Naturalist star life

Diamondstar: The life in your head

So you've signed up for a course in astronomy. Conscious of your
responsibilities as a student, and sort of interested in the sky, you
read the syllabus. Under Day 4, you spot the phrase "The Life Cycle
of Stars."
The "life" cycle? Are stars alive?
Knowing the instructor might chortle at such a question, you keep
quiet, and vigilant for a possible answer.
At every turn, the instructor talks as if stars are alive. He speaks of
"stellar evolution," as if whole species of stars were living up there.
He speaks of "star birth," which occurs when gas and dust in space
clump together and attract more gas and dust, which eventually
accretes to such a mass that it starts to contract and create heat.
He speaks of the "lifetimes" of stars, because it turns out most stars
gain a mature stability for a few million or a few billion years,
depending largely on their size, and then in their "old age"
(according to the prof) their bodies go through changes that for some
include enormous expansion into "red giants." The "death" of some
stars occurs in a spectacular explosion called a supernova, and the
death of others amounts to a process of burning out and fading
away. Sounds familiar.
Other weird things apparently happen to large stars, where they
collapse and disappear from sight as black holes and "singularities."
A black hole is a region of space where a large mass, probably left
over from a star explosion, has contracted to a few miles or less in
diameter and its gravity is so concentrated that even photons of light
can't escape from it. A singularity is a point predicted in physics at
which the star material has contracted so much that the contracting
can't stop - the star has abandoned its natural physical form and
seems to disappear into itself. This does not sound very familiar
unless you think about it too much.
Smaller stars in their old age also shrink, and at an elderly stage
different metals, such as iron or lead, are about all that's produced
during the burnout. In some cases carbon can be supercompressed in
the contraction until the interior of the star becomes, essentially, a
diamond. It takes billions of years to make a star a diamond.
This was just a theory born from physics equations until a few years
ago when some astronomers found a star, BPM 37093 in the
constellation Centaurus, which gives off most of the readings
predicted in the equations. The core of BPM 37093 apparently is a
massive diamond weighing about 10 billion trillion trillion carats.
You can't take it with you, however, and neither can stars. Despite
its achievement, BPM 37093 will go the way of all the other dwarf
stars before it and all those after it, and fade into the vastness of
space.
The instructor stops short of using the word "achievement."
Somehow that got into your head by itself. Just like people, stars are
born, live, and die, and just like stars, people shine, burn out, and
disappear. Can a person become so crystalline inside himself he is
essentially a diamond? (Or lead?)
Not really. The astronomy prof is just using metaphors. Stars don't
actually have "life" cycles. And human minds cannot, through the
stress of prodigious energies, become "diamonds." Can they?

© Dana Wilde 2007
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