Written in the stars, what have we learned from them?

Looking up is healthy.

Socrates already said it.

According to the illustrious Greek, it allows us to think about things that are more noble than everyday life, although, and I say this, there is also nobility in many areas of everyday life.

With just a small turn of the neck and even if it is only for a moment, we can escape from the noise of the world, from wars, social networks, the electricity bill and the world.

Give it a try, it's simple and costs nothing.

Let's take a breath and a little perspective.

If it is in the field, better;

and if it is in silence, and on a dark night, even better.

Let's focus on the night.

Let's think, now, for a moment about the infinite points of light that fill the night sky.

Those tiny lighthouses have guided us, I mean humanity, throughout history.

Thanks to the stars we have oriented ourselves on impossible journeys when the Earth was an even more unknown place.

They have been the compasses that allowed us to move long distances long before we even understood where we were going.

And although we are not the only animals that use them to orient themselves, we are the only ones that are causing no other animals to see them, including ourselves.

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How do we know what stars are made of?

The stars have fed us when almost all of our kind turned to agriculture.

They helped us measure the passage of time, that still great unknown.

One of the most beautiful, Sirius, warned the Egyptians that the time of the flooding of the Nile was approaching.

Almost nothing.

Mind you, they fail to predict human affairs.

But that hasn't stopped astrologers and necromancers from cashing in ever since they learned how to fool medieval kings.

Nothing happens because we have all benefited from the collection of astronomical data financed by this fictitious predictive capacity.

These data on the movement of the stars have contributed to the discovery of all the laws of nature that we know so far, from Newton to Einstein, to give the example of two men that we have all heard of.

Even if it was an unknown woman, Cecilia Payne, who understood what they were made of.

The stars have fed us when we switched to agriculture.

Mind you, they fail to predict human affairs.

But that hasn't stopped astrologers and necromancers from deceiving

But what are they?

What have we learned from them over the years?

Well, we know that despite being the heaviest thing that exists, they are made of the lightest: hydrogen and helium.

Barely 1% of the Sun's mass is made up of elements such as oxygen, iron, nickel or silicon and, among them, the most abundant are the lightest.

What makes us what we are makes up the smallest part of a star's mass.

We have understood that they shine because the temperature inside them is very high, millions of degrees higher than on their surface, and that matter there is in a state that is not one of those we learned about in school.

It is not in the form of a liquid, a gas or a solid.

In a star, the material is in the form of plasma.

A light plasma that counteracts its own weight by nuclear fusion: transforming every second millions of kilograms of hydrogen into helium, or helium into carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and so on, until it reaches iron, which is what makes them explode if they hit them. untill there.

Not all do.

Stairway to Heaven in Big Bend National Park in Texas (United States). Jai Shet

There are red, white, blue, yellow, black.

Yes, they have colors, you just have to look a little to see them.

The color, except if they are black, is due to their temperature.

Blue stars are the hottest.

They also exist in the form of dwarfs and giants and there are those that are not even: we call them fleeting.

Some, like red dwarfs, live forever: they could be at most the age of the universe.

Others, like brown dwarfs, do not cook completely, they do not have enough mass.

And among those that have changed and change very quickly are the red giants and supergiants.

Astrophysicists are very fond of calling things by their appearance.

We believe that almost all of them have planets, although we expect, for many reasons, that some have more than others.

Most of them, and this is most surprising, are not alone.

They are born in pairs, or in trios, and remain so until one of them, the most massive, eats the other or explodes destroying her mate or, if she survives, sends her traveling through the galaxy at full speed. speed.

Most stars have planets, they are not alone.

They are born in pairs and remain so until the more massive one eats the other or explodes destroying its partner.

There are those who slowly return what they have built in their bowels.

Everything to fill stars of the age of the Sun with that 1% of material from which we are also made.

The infinity of the big and the small is written in each one of those tiny lighthouses.

There are many, more than you can count and they have always been useful for precisely that.

We count to imagine infinity.

We have dared to write with them even human stories weaving shapes to their constellations.

If Homer was able to reach Ithaca it was because he kept the Bear, the big bear, to his left and if Penelope endured the wait it is because he knew how to manage time.

The oldest profession of humanity, make no mistake, is the one that has used the stars to make clocks, calendars and compasses.

In the stars we read the past and the future, not the human one, but that of absolutely everything.

That is written on them, although they haven't told us everything yet.

They have not said their last word.

I hope that, before we suffocate to death in our own gases, they will allow us to understand, at least, what dark matter and dark energy are.

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