Star Thoughts

The G2 V star was in its sixth orbit around its galaxy's center. Whether this fact made it old or young, progressed or behind, it didn't much consider. In fact, so far in its life, the star didn't consider anything at all. It fused hydrogen into helium with the weight of its own gravity, shedding luminous energy out into space, and it slowly swung its way around the galaxy - and that was that.

Then something extraordinary happened. Another star about a hundred thousand light-years away blew out in a spectacular supernova. One moment it was a normal tiny pin-prick of light like the star of our story, the next it was a blazing sphere of expanding radiation, and then there was nothing except the fraying bubble of energy gradually spreading itself across space.

The little G2 V star was greatly disturbed. "I'm not going to twinkle forever am I?" it thought to itself, somewhat selfishly. Questions it had never conceived before rose up inside it like sunspots, which could all be condensed into: How could that have happened - old age? Then it realized with a shock that it had no idea how old it was. Sure, it knew it had traveled around the galaxy five times, but what did that really mean? That said nothing about how long the star had to live. Once it began wondering about its age, many other wonderings about itself occurred to it. It had enough mass to create nuclear fusion in its core, but how massive was it exactly? It had seen other stars that were smaller than it and some that were much larger; where did it stand? Would its mass change over time? Why did it orbit the center of the galaxy? What kind of a massive celestial body kept it in this gravitational bondage? Would it circle it for the rest of its life? A more frightful thought: Would it stop circling it?

The star hadn't been so unsettled since it established gravitational equilibrium within itself. It pondered and thought and questioned for the rest of its sixth orbit.

The strain of uncertainty was beginning to wear on the star. As everyone knows, stars are beings of constancy, spending the majority of their lives - a small eternity - hanging in the sky and shining brilliantly. At key moments in their life-cycle there is relatively rapid change, such as the helium flash, but it was hard on the star of our story to be in so agitated a state when it was actually in the midst of the most sedate part of its life. (It didn't know this, of course.) It wanted to forget its questions, let go of its worry, and continue on with radiating light into the universe. But how could it just go on when it wasn't sure if it was going to? It might explode in the next rotation! What if it fell out of its orbit and never found its way back? Oh, how it yearned for certainty or, failing that, mental oblivion!

This agonizing contemplation lasted for a long time. A long time for a star is very long indeed. Finally, the star couldn't help but notice that nothing drastic was happening to it, that its own life was just the same as it had always been: its mass was not fluctuating, its fusion rate was constant, its orbital path was unchanged. Uneasy but calmer, the star began to look around itself at the system surrounding it, the galaxy it moved through, and further to the universe beyond.

Although at first the star did not find answers to its questions in the vast and varied void called the universe, there were many, many interesting things it discovered. There were globular star clusters, close binary systems, elliptical galaxies, ringed planets and gap moons, stars of all colors, black holes, planets that were almost stars, countless fascinating celestial bodies! But even the spaces in between these held thought-absorbing treasures: interstellar clouds, galactic winds,  and things unseen, like dark matter. Some inhabitants of the universe were not reassuring in the least. Cepheid variables, stars that never quite succeeded in gaining gravitational equilibrium and consequently fluctuate in luminosity, were horrifying to the little star. Unbound objects, pulsars, galactic collisions, accretion disks, and central dominant galaxies (known as "cannibal" galaxies) also filled  it with terror. It found that fate could be very cruel sometimes and there was nothing that could be done about it. After the distraction of exploration wore off, the star became even more confused and frightened. More questions came to it, more puzzles were sparked, the sense of fragility and chaos increased, until the star even began to be angry with the universe, a feeling completely alien to it up to that point.

Eventually the star found itself along that stretch of its orbital path where it had witnessed the supernova. The bubble of radiation resulting from that cosmic explosion was no longer discernible; only a blank patch of space remained where a star had once lived. But wait - what was that? A teeny tiny red glow against the dark distance, something flickering with life? Surely the star was imagining things, wishing too hard for a small sign of what had been. When the star examined the spot more closely, however, it was evident that it hadn't been mistaken at all: there really was a tiny point of soft glowing light! Amazed, alarmed, and shimmering with hope, the star extended its senses to the absolute limit and probed the glow with all its might.

What it found was a neutron star, an extremely compact but massive object barely resembling a star which kept from collapsing in on itself through neutron degeneracy pressure rather than the nuclear fusion pressure used by normal stars. During its exploration of the universe, the star had of course observed neutron stars but it hadn't known they were left after supernovae. It hadn't thought supernovae left anything behind! Imagine, all those neutron stars and pulsars had once been ordinary stars.

Suddenly a deep and remote presence made itself known to the star. The presence spoke in a wordless and slow way, yet somehow was striking in its power. It was annoyed.

A few moments passed before the startled star recognized that the neutron star was communicating with it. What was it saying?

All this exclaiming is unnecessary and the neutron star wants to be left in peace.

Chagrined, the G2 V star tried to quiet itself but it was so excited! It had just discovered there was something left after its life energy was expended in a supernova. It would live on as a neutron star and -

You, a neutron star? Ha ha. Much too puny.

Stunned, the little star felt all its joy dwindle to nothing.

Small stars become white dwarfs after they give off their planetary nebulae. Large stars have enough mass to glorify the heavens with supernovae and continue on as neutron stars. If fate is generous and grants the star with great mass, it might even blossom into a black hole. Every star knows this.

And then the star began to feel inside itself that it had known this. It could feel in the balance of its mass that it would one day use up its hydrogen and become a white dwarf, using electron degeneracy pressure to fight off gravitational collapse. It knew this like it knew how to follow the pull of the galactic center in an orbit; like it knew that it would never fall out of its path because that was its place in the galaxy; like it knew gravity was a force mass exerted on other mass; like it knew that atoms came together to form new atoms and energy in a process called nuclear fusion; like it knew that nothing in the universe never just popped out of existence, but continually changed into something else.

It wanted to laugh at the absurdity of its previous notions. How silly of it to think that a star could burn itself out in an explosion and dissipate in a cloud of pointless energy!

Supernovae are never pointless. The neutron star directed the G2 V star's attention to the supernova remnant it had overlooked before. Once detected, the remnant was so beautiful and dynamic the star was surprised it had missed it before. The debris and energy were scattered in a vibrant churning wave across the blackness of space. Colliding with other dust grains floating in the abyss, interacting, and forming clumps of mass that spun in the pattern of the gravitational structures around it, the remnant was being incorporated into the cycle of the galaxy. Soon stars would form out of the glowing clouds.

Awed, the star of our story looked at the universe with a new perspective. Although it lacked the seemingly absolute assurance and innate wisdom the neutron star possessed, it found within itself a kind of latent optimism that buoyed it toward such certainty. After all, the neutron star was very progressed in its life; perhaps one day the G2 V star would be as composed.

For now the little star would drift along its path in near serenity, meditating upon the perplexing but wondrous pattern of the universe.