THE next time you stargaze, think about how old and how very far away the stars are.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The light from our Sun for instance takes a little over 8 minutes to reach us. Coming from our nearest star 4 years and Sirius, our brightest star, a whopping 8.6 years.
If one of the stars in the constellation of Orion, or the 'Saucepan,' blew up tonight, I wouldn't know about it for 900 years! I'd have to wait here until the 30th century to see it. The light takes that long to reach us.
Stars live for billions of years and most seem to have their own solar systems, like ours does. Now, if planets form from the hydrogen gas of hot stars as we believe, where did all the Earth's water come from?
This was a question emailed to me by a reader. Well, to put it simply, it is produced inside a star, our Sun in fact!
Water can't exist in its liquid form in stars, but hydrogen and oxygen separately can. Hydrogen is the basic building material of the universe, created in the Big Bang and oxygen is created by nuclear reactions in stars. If you put H and O together in the cold of space, you get H2O, or water!
What about all the metals like gold, silver, bronze and the tin my telescopes are made of? Yep, you guessed it, all from inside a star. It all came from stars that lived and died before our Sun was even born.
When those stars puffed out their final breaths they seeded the Universe with the raw material for new worlds. We owe our very existence to the dead stars that came before.
Get the idea we're all made of star stuff? Right, everything at one stage was inside a star - even you and I. We're more related than you think. Just imagine the atoms of your arm and someone else's leg were floating around out there inside a star at one time or another. It may sound quirky but it's true. Isn't nature great!
OK, back down to earth, your backyard in fact. The Orionids meteor shower is happening right now and generally is a good one for beginners with estimates of around 30 meteors per hour. The downside is they're best viewed from Wauchope around 3am until an hour before sunrise. The shower is centred on Orion's club and the meteors are typically fast, sometimes very bright.