Stardust

"Sometimes in those wee, small hours after midnight: the dark, quiet time when solitude is almost tangible, I philosophize. And thus I came to write what follows." — VirtualWayne

Our Universe is made of three ingredients: Hydrogen. Helium. The dust of exploded stars. Our earth is a ball of such dust. The substance of our bodies was formed, eons ago, in the heart of a star. Pause for a moment and think about what that means. Literally, we are made of stardust. We are remnants of ancient stars.

 

 In a nearby galaxy some 13 million light years from Earth, clusters of new stars are being formed from interstellar gas and dust. Hundreds of massive blue stars, each of them 10,000 times brighter than our Sun, are forming in the center of this galaxy.

 
How many stars are there?

Our Sun is one star among two hundred billion that form a spiral galaxy: an enormous pinwheel of stars we call the “Milky Way." If we could see our own galaxy it might appear similar to this beautiful spiral galaxy.


The light from this dusty spiral galaxy has traveled for 60 million years to reach Earth. Like most spiral galaxies, the central region contains mostly older, yellow and red stars. The spiral arms, where star formation is ongoing, contain young, blue stars. The galaxy is too far away to discern individual stars. Bright points of light are clusters of hundreds of thousands of stars.

Galaxies do not travel through space alone. Our Milky Way galaxy is one member of a cluster of galaxies we call the Local Group.

And as galaxies form clusters, clusters form larger structures called superclusters. Our Local Group of galaxies is part of the Local Supercluster, also called the Virgo Supercluster.

Billions of galaxies exist within range of earthbound telescopes. The number of stars in the observable Universe is 100 trillion trillion. That is more than one star for every grain of sand on all the beaches on planet Earth.

“Vast” is inadequate to describe the Universe. It is vast beyond imagination, vast beyond our ability to conceive of such vastness.

 
This is galaxy cluster Abell 2218. This distant cluster of galaxies represents a very small section of sky. Massive intervening galaxies act as a gravitational lens, magnifying and distorting distant light and enabling astronomers to see even farther into the Universe.

In this inconceivable immenseness, in these billions of galaxies and trillions of stars we can see, and perhaps more, in all of this, there is only one of you.

No other being has your combination of talents, experiences, your way of seeing our world.

No other creature has walked the path you have walked, no other eyes have seen all the things yours have seen, no other mind has known all the things yours has known. And though a billion years pass, the Universe will not see another exactly like you.

You are stardust, the remnant of ancient stars, and you are unique in the Universe.

There is something sacred in that.

 
The star cluster M80 is a globular cluster inside our own galaxy. Located 28,000 light years from Earth, it contains hundreds of thousands of stars and is one of over 150 known globular clusters in our galaxy. All the stars in this cluster have the same age, about 15 billion years. Especially obvious are the red giants, which are stars similar to our Sun that are nearing the end of their lives.

As you travel your path, keep in mind that your fellow travelers are as unique as you.

Even as you walk your path alone, I walk my path alone. You cannot visit my world. Nor can I visit yours.

At times there is a gulf between us. It is because we forget we are all unique.

Our mission, while we are in the Universe, is to bridge that gulf.

For like the spokes of a wheel, though we begin our journeys at different places, our paths one day will meet.


Sixty five hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Aquila, a planetary nebula — a cloud of gas ejected thousands of years ago from the star at its center — fluoresces under intense ultraviolet radiation from the star. One day our sun will do this, but that day is 6 billion years away. Planetary nebula are so called because of their round shape. They have nothing to do with planets.

Your body is stardust, dust that was lifeless and silent for a billion years, until one day you came and gave that dust structure and movement.

You are not your body. You live in your body. Your body exists because you exist.

You are something else. Some call it lifeforce. Some call it spirit. Whatever you call it, it is energy, and energy cannot be destroyed. Energy can only be transformed.


Fifty five million light years from Earth, toward the constellation Ursa Major, floats this spiral galaxy that we see “edge-on”. Dark clouds of interstellar dust obscure the background stars. Only about half the galaxy is contained in this photo. The very bright star does not belong to the galaxy; it is in our own Milky Way and happens to lie in the line of sight.

You are a visitor in the Universe. This Universe is not your home. One day your body will die but you will not die.

You are here for a reason. You have a purpose. Your life is not frivolous. Life is a gift; you have lessons to learn, and you have been given a life so that you may learn those lessons. But you are allowed, even encouraged, to have fun while you are here.

It’s like being in school:
Take your lessons seriously, but don’t forget to play!


The nebula N81 in the Small Magellanic Cloud is a stellar nursery. Young, hot stars within the nebula emit ultraviolet radiation, causing the nebula to glow through fluorescence. The brightest stars are about 300,000 times as bright as our Sun.

Before the Universe was born, nothing existed. The Universe wasn’t just empty space: Space itself did not exist. Neither Space nor Time existed until the “Big Bang” created the Universe.


Colliding galaxies: the blue-white stars are new stars formed by the shock wave of the collision in interstellar gas and dust. When galaxies collide, the individual stars almost never collide, as their size is tiny compared to the distances between them. However, galaxies contain and are surrounded by atomic and molecular gases and dust. When these interstellar clouds collide, the resultant high ram pressures produce matter densities sufficient to cause star formation through gravitational collapse.

Look again at our Universe.

It’s full of mystery: thermonuclear fire and black holes; dark clouds; stellar nurseries; fantastic structures thousands of light years in length and composed of stars and nebulae.


Planetary nebula Mz3: fiery lobes protrude from a dying Sun-like star. It is not known how a spherical star produces such non-spherical symmetries in the gas it ejects. One possibility is gravitational influence of an unseen companion star. Another possibility postulates magnetic field lines that are twisted by the star’s rapid spin.

The birth of the Universe is called the Big Bang. When it was born, the Universe was smaller than an atom. It expanded explosively in every direction, and it is still expanding today.


The Keyhole Nebula, a structure within the Carina Nebula, is about 8000 light years from Earth. Hot, fluorescing gas and clouds of cold dust are sculpted by radiation and stellar winds from a massive star just outside the photo toward the upper left.

The Big Bang created not only all matter in the Universe, it created all space, too. The Big Bang was a vast, expanding, frothing mixture of space and subatomic particles and energy. That mixture cooled and “solidified” into what we call the Universe.


This planetary nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a dying star. The dying star is not the bright star in the center, but its faint companion. This nebula is about half a light year in diameter and is about 2000 light years from Earth. Blue regions contain the hottest gas and red regions contain the coolest. The filaments of dust stretched across the nebula are rich in elements like carbon.

Some believe that a group of souls called Starborn existed before our planet existed and were the first souls to incarnate as human beings.

If that is true, those souls must feel what I feel when I look to the night sky — a longing to visit that frothing sea and to cruise the endless star-filled void as if it were my true home.

What marvels must lie hidden in that endless vastness: things more wonderful and more terrible than any that ever visited human imagination, worlds too incredible to be dreamt of, giant red suns and small blue-white suns that litter the void like an explosion of diamonds on an infinite dark sea.


Long ago, a star exploded in a nearby galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Though the explosion occured 169,000 years ago, light from the supernova first reached Earth in the year 1987. The stellar explosion was named Supernova 1987A. During the first few seconds of the detonation, the star released more energy than all the stars in the visible universe combined. The remnant of the star has created an unusual set of rings which are seen against a backdrop of stars, gas, and dust.

We are a part of all this — as much a part of Creation as the stars in the sky.

We are Spirit. We are Stardust. We are Unique. This awesome Creation is our classroom, and Reality itself is the page upon which we write our lessons. What wonderful gifts we have been given!

The first gift we received was life itself. If you and I, little by little, try to understand one another — perhaps it may be said that we were worthy of that gift.


Hodge 301 is near the edge of the most active starburst region in the local universe. A cluster of brilliant, massive stars, it is in the lower right corner of this image. Hodge 301 is in the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Many of the stars in Hodge 301 have exploded as supernovae. Their ejecta, traveling at 200 miles per second, have compressed the gas and dust in this nebula into sheets and filaments.

Images: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA)
Text: VirtualWayne