Superstar—Part 1

Back in 1971 Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice—two very talented Brits—conceived of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” and ushered in a new kind of entertainment, as well as provoked a lot of people to rethink the story of Jesus. I recently watched the 1973 movie once again—an inspired production filmed in the beautiful Israeli desert. I love the music!

What Sir Andrew and Sir Tim couldn’t anticipate was that decades after their opera, another type of superstar would be discovered—this time not by a couple of talented Brits, but by a skilled Israeli astronomer. Avishay Gal-Yam has an article in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American magazine, titled “Super Supernovae,” that describes how he and associates came upon these superstars. (Maybe super superstars?)

Prior to this discovery, the accepted wisdom in the astronomical world was that the largest a star could get was maybe as much as 100 times the size of our sun. There are many kinds of stars in our majestic universe—with a wide range of size, temperature, color, brightness, age, and number (single, double, or even triple stars). Each kind has its own type of life history. Every star winks into existence when a cloud of interstellar gas (almost completely hydrogen) collapses on itself and ignites under tremendous gravitational pressure, kicking off a nuclear fusion process. The star emits its shine for millions or billions of years, as the hydrogen fuel becomes slowly fused into helium.

When the hydrogen begins to run out is when stars get interesting. Their next act is a dying one—sometimes far more dramatic than what Shakespeare conjured up in “Romeo and Juliet.” The nature of that swan song depends mostly on the size of the star. Every star begins to collapse into itself, when its fuel diminishes. Some (like our sun) will then swell into red giants, and what’s left after that will then shrink back to a white dwarf. If the dwarf has a partner (part of a double star system) that’s still burning, the dwarf may steal some of its partner’s fuel and later explode into a nova. They are called that because, to the ancients (who were very familiar with the night sky), the explosion suddenly became very visible to the naked eye and seemed to them to be a new star appearing in the heavens.

More superstars next time…