Thermonuclear-combusting balls of gas – alive? It’s all 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?