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THE STARS OF HEAVEN
Works by Clifford A. Pickover
Clifford A. Pickover
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
www.oup.com
135798642
the reasons we
and smiling,
on Earth.
God gave us the darkness so we could see the stars.
— Johnny Cash, "Farmers' Almanac"
Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets,
and every planet its own creatures,
whose number no man can compute.
— Baha'u'llah
J. owe a special debt of gratitude to physicist and astronomer Dr. Dina Moche,
for her wonderful books and papers from which I have drawn many facts re-
garding the stars. I heartily recommend her book Astronomy for a lively, up-to-
date account of the wonders of planets, stars, and galaxies. I also thank Marcus
Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, a compelling story of stellar nucleosyn-
thesis and the "miracle" of the triple alpha process. Kirk Jensen, Clay Fried,
Dennis Gordon, and David Glass have made valuable suggestions regarding
the manuscript.
Finally, I thank Samuel Marcius for symbols such as and
which represent Miss Muxdroozol and Mr. Plex.
vii
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Introduction x
CHAPTER 1
Stellar Parallax and the Quest for Transcendence 1
CHAPTER 2
The Joy and Paschen of Starlight 14
CHAPTER 3
Spectral Classes, Temperatures, and Doppler Shifts 39
CHAPTER 4
Luminosity and the Distance Modulus 58
CHAPTER 5
Hertzsprung-Russell, Mass-Luminosity Relations, 71
and Binary Stars
CHAPTER 6
Last Tango on the Heliopause 90
T CHAPTER 7
Stellar Evolution and the Helium Flash 117
CHAPTER 8
Stellar Graveyards, Nucleosynthesis, and Why We Exist 142
-& CHAPTER 9
Some Final Thoughts 188
Notes 198
Index 229
ix
Introduction
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're
always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend
... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than
moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade.
Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that
twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
— Neil Caiman, The Sandman #48: Journey's End
Smilodon Overdrive
Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and
drink the universe in a glass of rain.
J. he other day I was walking in a field when I came upon a large skull. It was
probably from a bear, although I like to imagine it was part of the remains of a
prehistoric mammal that once roamed Westchester County, New York. I'm a
collector of prehistoric skulls. In my office, I have a skull of a saber-tooth tiger,
also known to scientists as the smilodon. This killing machine had huge, dag-
ger-like canine teeth and a mouth that could open 90 degrees to clear the sabers
for their killing bite.
When I run my fingers lingeringly over the skulls, I am sometimes reminded
of stars in the heavens. Without stars, there could be no skulls. The elements in
bone, like calcium, were first created in stars and then blown into space when
the stars died (figure I.I). Without stars there would be no elements heavier
than hydrogen and helium, and, therefore, life would never have evolved. There
would be no planets, no microbes, no plants, no tigers, no humans.
Now I look at the saber-tooth tiger's skull, so massive, so deadly. Without
stars, the tiger racing across the savanna fades away, ghostlike. There are no
iron atoms for its blood, no oxygen for it to breathe, no carbon for its proteins
and DNA. There are no mossy caverns, mist-covered swamps, black vipers, reti-
nas, spiral nautilus shells. Our existence requires stars to forge the heavy ele-
x
Figure I.I The calcium in our bones was first created in furnaces located
in the center of stars. [From Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle,
Albinus on Anatomy (New York: Dover, 1979), 29.]
xii The Stars of Heaven
ments in massive fusion reactions, but we also need the stars to explode at the
ends of their lives to wash the new elements far into space. Without these su-
pernova explosions, there are no seagull cries, computer chips, trilobites,
Beethovens, or the tears of a little girl. There is no Golgotha, and Jesus never
gave his Sermon on the Mount. There is no one to speak the words, "Thy will
be done on Earth, as it is in heaven." Without exploding stars, perhaps there
would be a heaven, but there certainly would be no Earth.
Let's imagine the origin of calcium in this tiger tooth that I hold. The atoms
created in the dying ancient stars were blown across vast distances and eventually
formed the elements in the planets that coalesced around our Sun. If you could
turn back time and follow the carbon atoms in the tiger's brain back to their
source, you would connect the tiger to an unimaginably long interstellar journey
that culminated in the giant stars, which died in violence billions of years ago.
Humans and tigers and whales and plants and all that we see on Earth are stellar
ashes. And when the ancient tiger died, the atoms in its flesh kept going. Perhaps
one of the tiger's atoms coalesced into your embryonic form.
I know I almost sound religious when I tell my friends about the stars. We
are lucky we live in an age in which we can wonder about the myriad cosmic
"coincidences" that permitted the creation of stars and the flushing of their
heavy elements to the Universe. I'll explain in this book how various nuclear
and chemical constants are precariously poised to permit life. It is as if the
constants sat on the head of a pin, the tiny point of which encourages a Uni-
verse full of complex compounds rather than the seemingly more likely oceans
of monotonous hydrogen. We are the memorial to shattered stars. We are the
afterlife of which blazing stars could never dream.
The elements in our world are constantly changing. With every breath, we
inhale millions of atoms of air exhaled a few days ago by someone on the other
side of the planet. In some sense, our brains and organs are vanishing into thin
air, the cells being replaced as quickly as they are destroyed. The entire skin
replaces itself every month. Our stomach linings replace themselves every five
days. We are always in flux. A year from now, 98 percent of the atoms in our
bodies will have been replaced with new ones. We are nothing more than a
seething mass of moving atoms, continuous threads in the fabric of spacetime.
What does it mean that your body has nothing in common with the body you
had a few years ago? If you are something other than the collection of atoms
making up your body, what are you? You are not so much your atoms as you are
the pattern in which your atoms are arranged. Very likely you have the atoms of
the great Biblical prophets coursing through your body, and they, like all of us,
breathed in the atoms from the stuff of stars. As mathematician Rudy Rucker
Introduction xiii
has noted, "The simple processes of eating and breathing weave all of us to-
gether into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may
sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the
whole."1
Who are we? Where do we come from? In Joni Mitchell's 1960s song
Woodstock we hear the answer, "We are Stardust, billion year old carbon."2 In
this book, I will help you to better understand the meaning of these words.
Starry Night
The heavens call to you, and circle about you, displaying to you their
eternal splendors, and your eye gazes only to earth.
— Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio
^tars have fascinated us since the dawn of history and have allowed us to
transcend ordinary lives in both literature and the arts. I think the painter
Vincent van Gogh glimpsed a poignant portion of reality at the height of his
interest in stars, van Gogh loved to read about astronomy and wondered about
what it would mean to travel to the stars. His famous Starry Night, painted in
1889, shows stars not as points of lights but as bright orbs with the sky swirling
about them like a magical stream (figure 1.2). Van Gogh contemplated new
ways of painting stars so they revealed their glory and took over the canvas. He
also thought about what stars might mean to humans and their place in the
Universe.
Around the time van Gogh painted Starry Night, he wrote about stars to his
brother Theo. His letter seems to be a meditation on the realm between life and
death and perhaps how death might be a portal to the stars:
Is the whole of life visible to us, or do we in fact know only the one hemi-
sphere before we die? For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the
sight of the stars makes me dream, in the same simple way as I dream about the
black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, should
the shining dots in the sky be any less accessible to us than the black dots on the
map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, then we take
death to go to a star. What is certainly true in this reasoning is that while we are
alive we cannot go to a star, any more than, once dead, we could catch a train. It
seems not impossible to me that cholera, gravel, phthisis [a wasting disease, es-
pecially tuberculosis], and cancer could be the means of celestial transportation,
just as steam-boats, omnibuses, and railways serve that function on earth. To die
peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.3
XIV The Stars of Heaven
Many authors have speculated that van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy
and that this brain disorder intensified his religious needs and experiences.4
For van Gogh, abnormal electrical activity in the brain was a portal that opened
doors to entirely new ways of seeing and feeling. He once wrote, "I often feel a
terrible need of—shall I say the word?—of religion. Then I go out at night to
paint the stars."5 At the time that he painted Starry Night he was in the asylum
and had about a year to live. But his mental instability and acuteness did not
mean that Starry Night was the wild raving of a lunatic or conjured up without
observing the sky. He wrote to his brother Theo, "This morning I saw the coun-
try from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning
star, which looked very big." The morning star is another name for Venus, which
is probably portrayed as the large bright shimmering form, just to the left of
center in his painting. According to University of California-Los Angeles art
Introduction xv
historian Albert Boime, astronomical data proves the placement of stars and
moon in Starry Night are accurate for the night on which it is known to have
been painted. In particular, Boime has reconstructed the probable alignment
of stars and planets in the painting, seeing in the painting three stars of the
constellation Aries as well the Moon and Venus.6
In some ways van Gogh made us see the Universe in a different light and,
with just a few strokes of a paint brush, allowed us to appreciate the vastness of
the night sky as much as modern telescope images do. Look at figure 1.2. Look
at the contrast between the intense turbulence of the heavens and the calm
order of the village and church below. The contrast makes the sky resonate in
the mind long after your eyes leave the painting.
van Gogh's art is just one example of humanity's passion for stars. In fact,
humans have always looked to the stars as a source of inspiration and transcen-
dence to lift them beyond the boundaries of ordinary intuition. The ancient
Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Mexicans were very aware of the locations
and motions of the visible stars. Some of these cultures had catalogued and
grouped thousands of stars and perhaps thought that the visible stars were all
the stars that existed.7 On the other hand, the Old Testament writers theorized
there were many more stars than humans could see. According to Genesis 22:17,
the stars were as great in number as the sands of the seashore and simply could
not be numbered. The vast reaches of the cosmos were utterly incomprehen-
sible to humans: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:9).
In the Bible, stars are a sign of God's power and majesty. In Job 38:31-32,
God reminds Job of His omnipotence and names several constellations of stars:
"Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?8 Can you loose the cords of Orion?9 Can
you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its
cubs?10 Do you know the laws of the heavens?" In Isaiah 40:26, God similarly
reminds us that He knows their number and their names: "Lift your eyes and
look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host
one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty
strength, not one of them is missing."
Probably the most famous star in the Bible occurs in Matthew 2:1-2, which
describes a group of travelers, called Magi, heading toward Bethlehem from some-
where in the east. These Magi are most likely astrologers. They had seen a special
star and were bringing gifts for "the one who has been born king of the Jews."
Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east,
and are come to worship him. . .. And lo, the star, which they saw in the east,
XVI The Stars of Heaven
went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. When
they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy. (Matthew 2:1-2, 9-10)
Over the centuries numerous scholars have sought a scientific explanation for
the Star of Bethlehem (figure 1.3). Jesus seems to have been born sometime
between 4 and 8 B.C. Chinese annals record novae (bright stars) in 5 B.C. and 4
B.C. In the early seventeenth century Johannes Kepler suggested that the Star of
Bethlehem may have been a nova in the constellation of Pisces the Fish occur-
ring near a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn around 7 B.C.11 (Coincidentally, a
fish has long been a symbol of the Christian church.)
Figure 1.3 Wise men guided by the Star of Bethlehem. [From Gustave Dore,
The Dore Bible Illustrations (New York: Dover Publications, 1974), 163.]
Introduction xvii
In Islamic theology, the number of stars is also a metaphor for a huge num-
ber. In pre-Islamic times, Ka'b Al-Ahbar was one of the great Jewish scholars.
He later became a Muslim and said, "On the 15th of [the month of] Shaban,
Allah ordered that Paradise be decorated, and then Allah freed from hellfire as
many persons as the number of stars in the universe."12
Today we can get a feel for the actual number of stars that exist in the Uni-
verse. It is clear that there are a lot more stars than contemplated by many early
astronomers. For example, well before Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-
1642) developed the first telescopes for astronomical observation in 1609, Greek
astronomer Hipparchus (ca. 127 B.C.) compiled a star catalogue containing 850
stars, and Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (127-151) increased the number
to 1,022 stars. Ptolemy's star catalogue is the oldest surviving star catalogue,
and it grouped stars in constellations with the latitude, longitude, and the ap-
parent brightness of each star. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)
listed accurate positions of more than 777 stars. German astronomer Johannes
Kepler (1571-1630) catalogued 1,005 stars. Many later scientists such as Galileo
believed that the stars could not be numbered, and the Bible similarly states,
"... the host of heaven cannot be numbered."13
We live in a gravitational "froth" where gravity binds stars together to form
galaxies, binds galaxies into local groups of galaxies, groups of galaxies into
clusters, clusters into superclusters, and superclusters into "walls." Luckily for
us, the galaxies, with their strong gravitational attraction, consolidate the chemi-
cally enriched gas left over from stellar explosions. The number of stars in the
Universe boggles the mind. The variety is equally amazing—black holes, red
giants, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, Cepheid variables, neutron stars, pulsars ...
Our modern, sophisticated telescopes have only begun to reveal the immense
numbers and variety of stars. We find that our own Sun is just an ordinary star
that inhabits our Galaxy, the Milky Way, which has roughly 200 billion stars.
Some of the stars are much bigger—giants and even supergiants. There are
around 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe and each one of them
has roughly 100 billion stars. So there is roughly one galaxy for every star in the
Milky Way.14
When students ask astronomer William Keel of The University of Alabama
in Tuscaloosa how many stars exist in our Milky Way Galaxy, his standard an-
swer is "about as many as the number of hamburgers sold by McDonald's." It is
difficult to be precise because distance and dust absorption dim incoming light.
Measurements of the relative numbers of stars with different absolute bright-
ness suggests that for every Sun-like star there are about 200 faint red M-class
dwarfs. (As you'll learn, the "class" of a star is determined by its surface tern-
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