Star Life

Stars form out of giant clouds of dust and gas in space. Something disturbs the cloud, maybe a wind of particles from a nearby star or the shock wave from a supernova, and the cloud collapses and when gravity and the internal pressure from the compressed gas learn to get along and balance one another, a star is born. Like anything that spins in space, the newborn star has an accretion disk, a swirling ring of gases and dust that gets pulled into the star or thrown out into space by the twin jets coming from the poles of the star. Clearly, young stars are equivalent to elementary school girls, twirling with tutus or hula hoops, spinning with their arms above their heads and their feet dancing on the ground. It must be quite the sight to see, these huge amorphous clouds beginning to dance over millions of years. Stars never do anything too quickly.

But stars form in these huge clouds of dust, right? The clouds block out most of our attempts to see the stars- the dark patches in the Milky Way in our nighttime sky are dust lanes. The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery. But we can't see inside these clouds and in a field of science where the only information you get is light, seeing is crucial. So we scan the spectrum and hypothesize, but new stars aren't perfectly understood, especially the first new stars. Astronomers used to think that all of the first stars in the universe were giant stars, hundreds of times the size of our Sun. The bigger the star is, the faster it lives its life. Bright blue giant stars, like the brightest of the Pleiades or Sirius, may outshine something smaller and average, but their life will end sooner and more explosively than the smaller stars who will patiently shine, grow, sigh and fade as the millenniums pass by.

But these first stars, these bright bright giants that first let light into the Universe, we had always thought that these stars had formed alone, sowing the cold of space with their seeds of oxygen and carbon to make the battle between gravity and thermal pressure easier for the stars that came afterwords. Now, there's an idea that they may have formed with low mass companions, smaller stars collapsing out of the giant's accretion disk, living on for much longer and giving us hints about the early universe. The great thing about astronomy is that the farther away you look, the farther back in time you get to see. The most distant things we've detected are also the earliest. Seeing gamma rays from these earliest stars could give us hints about how galaxies form, snapshots from the childhood scrapbooks of the Universe.

Can you imagine being one of those stars, though? You spend your entire life revolving around this huge star that dies and leaves you to wait out the long lonely days of your life in the cold of space. You stay there and shine until there is absolutely nothing left that you can do and you peacefully send out the last rays you have to give. You are left to linger, to point the way to something bigger, and your last effort is to tell a story that is not yours, to smile as you pass on the information that another will need to better understand the beauty around him. To such a tiny other, with such a short life! Can you imagine?

Stars are so much more patient than me, so much more kind. They shine indiscriminately. They stay there, to help generations tell the stories, to remind us that we're connected, that we're small, that we're loved. I feel like the background character in my own life, waiting for happiness to happen to me. Stars don't get to choose- they take the mass, the elements, the space that is given to them and they do as they're supposed to do. They move according to their laws, they live and die according to their prescribed times and when they complain or throw a last, final tantrum, we're left with a stunning picture of their mess. Even in destruction, they're beautiful. But us, we're impulsive. We have these emotions, this free will, this real sense of life. Our days are so short and we get to choose and so we do. We reach for things we wouldn't normally reach for, if we were given billions of years to make our choices. Just because I can live without something doesn't mean that I want to- I want try many things, feel many things, step out of this cloud that I live in and say many things. Give me a shot. Let me live and in so living, let me shine. I already point to Someone brighter than me.