Looking up is healthy.
Socrates already said it. According to the famous Greek, it allows us to contemplate things that are nobler than everyday life, although, and I say this, there is nobility in many areas of everyday life too. With a little twist of the neck, even if only for a moment, we can escape from the noise of the world, from wars, from social networks, from electricity bills and from the world. Try it, it’s easy and free. Let’s take a breath and a little perspective. If it’s in the field, better; and when it’s in silence and on a dark night, even better.
Let’s focus on the night. Now let’s think for a moment about the infinite points of light that fill the night sky. These tiny beacons have guided us, I mean humanity, through history. Thanks to the stars, we found our bearings on impossible journeys when earth was an even more unknown place. They were the compasses that allowed us to move great distances long before we even understood where we were going. And while we’re not the only animals they use to get their bearings, we’re the only ones making sure no other animals see them, including ourselves.
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The stars sustained us when almost all of our kind turned to farming. They helped us measure the passage of time, that still great unknown. One of the most beautiful, Sirius, warned the Egyptians that the time of the Nile flood was near. Nearly nothing.
Mind you, they cannot predict human affairs. But that hasn’t stopped astrologers and necromancers from making money since they learned how to fool medieval kings. Nothing happens because we have all benefited from the collection of astronomical data funded by this fictitious forecasting capacity. This data on the motion of the stars has contributed to the discovery of every law of nature known to us, from Newton to Einstein, to cite two men we have all heard of. Even if it was an unknown woman, Cecilia Payne, who understood what they were made of.
The stars fed us when we switched to farming. Mind you, they cannot predict human affairs. But that hasn’t stopped astrologers and necromancers from deceiving
But what are they? What have we learned from them over the years? Well, we know that while they’re the heaviest, they’re made of the lightest: hydrogen and helium. Almost 1% of the sun’s mass consists of elements such as oxygen, iron, nickel or silicon, and among these are the most abundant and the lightest. What makes us what we are makes up the smallest part of a star’s mass.
We understood that they glow because the temperature inside is very high, millions of degrees higher than on the surface, and that matter is in a state that is not one of what we learned in school. It is not in the form of a liquid, gas or solid. In a star, the material is in the form of plasma. A light plasma that counteracts its own weight through nuclear fusion: converting millions of kilograms of hydrogen into helium or helium into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen every second, and so on, until it reaches iron, which causes it to explode if it hits them by then. Not all.
Stairway to Heaven in Big Bend National Park in Texas (USA) Jai Shet
There are red, white, blue, yellow, black. Yes, they have colors, you just have to look a little to see them. The color, except when black, is due to their temperature. Blue stars are the hottest. They also exist in the form of dwarfs and giants, and there are those that aren’t even: we call them fleeting.
Some, like red dwarfs, live forever: they could at most be as old as the universe. Others, like brown dwarfs, don’t fully cook, they don’t have enough mass. And among those that have changed and are changing very rapidly are the red giants and supergiants. Astrophysicists like to name things by their looks.
We believe almost all of them have planets, although for many reasons we expect some to have more than others. Most of them, and this is most surprising, are not alone. They are born in pairs or trios and remain so until one of them, the most massive, eats the other or explodes and destroys its partner or, if it survives, launches it to travel the galaxy at full speed.
Most stars have planets, they are not alone. They are born in pairs and remain so until the more massive one eats the other or explodes and destroys its mate.
There are those who are slowly giving back what they have built up in their guts. Everything to fill stars of the solar age with that 1% stuff that we are made of. The infinity of the great and the small is written in each of these tiny lighthouses. There are many, more than one can count, and that’s exactly what they’ve always been useful for. We count to imagine infinity.
We have dared to even write human stories with them by weaving shapes to their constellations. If Homer was able to reach Ithaca, it was because he had the bear, the biggest bear, on his left, and if Penelope endured the wait, it was because she knew how to manage the time. Mankind’s oldest profession, make no mistake, is the one that used the stars to make clocks, calendars and compasses.
In the stars we read the past and the future, not human, but of absolutely everything. It’s written to them, although they haven’t told us everything yet. They haven’t said their last word yet. I hope that before we choke on our own gases, they will allow us to at least understand what dark matter and dark energy are.
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