Paparazzi and the Stars

Why Does Anybody Care?

So, every few weeks I find  myself in a waiting room for some reason — a doc’s appointment, hair appointment, what have you — and I rummage through the magazines that are usually left out for us “waiters” to read.  I never find a copy of Sky & Telescope or Astronomy Magazine. It’s always something like a gossip rag with the latest breathless reportage about the sex lives of the movie stars/political establishment/megachurch pastor/you name it.

Do I read this stuff? Sure.  I call it “catching up on the literature”.  Mostly I do because I don’t otherwise get much chance to read this stuff.  I figure, if I”m going to talk about astronomy to the public, it helps to know what the public is reading about in other areas of the “information sphere” that we call “news”.  Not that everybody reads gossipy rags (or admits to it).  And, I’m not putting anyb0dy down for reading the stuff. It’s not like you can ignore the screaming headlines as you’re waiting in line at the grocery or drug store, is it?  And, there is this element of watching a disaster unfold that just sucks people in.  But, after a while, it gets kind of old. And, I don’t know about you, but I get uncomfortable having that much insight into somebody else’s marriage/family life/politics/dating partners/etc.

So, the latest “literature” is focused on a movie star and her philandering husband.  Hardly news, is it?  But, people passionately care about this stuff.  I mean, they care to the point of practically salivating over it. The comments about such stories on the news sites like CNN, etc. are a testament to people having WAY too much interest in other people’s private lives. Why?  I can’t think of anything more sad than to read breathless, titillating reporting about someone else’s misfortune, accompanied by pictures of said person snapped by a photographer who you know has been hanging out in his/her trees just waiting for the chance to invade his/her privacy.

As I see these headlines float by on the news sites, magazines, gossip rags, etc., I wonder why people don’t get as passionate about the truly interesting stuff in the universe — like the wonder of star birth?  Or the the discovery of new planets. Or the latest images from Mars or Saturn?  The cosmos has its own paparazzi taking images of it, in methodical ways that don’t invade privacy or raise a stink about whether or not so-and-so is going to sleep with so-and-so and when.  And, to my way of thinking, that stuff is way more interesting than whether or not Britney/Sandra/Jerry/Jim/whoever are getting divorced/overfed/sued/whatever.

Or am I just a hopeless geek?

The Saga of Eta Carinae

It WILL Go Boom… Sometime…

I am continually fascinated several regions of the sky. One of them is the Orion Nebula, where stars are being born. Another is the planet Mars, where I had sorta hoped I might get to explore in person someday.  Yet another is the Andromeda Galaxy — the closest spiral neighbor to our Milky Way.  And, yet another is the Carina Nebula, which is visible in southern hemisphere skies.

The Carina Nebula is a huge cloud of gas and dust located somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina.  If you’re an astronomer studying the ephemera of star life, such as star birth and star death (both of which pass relatively quickly in the long span of a star’s existence), then Carina has something for you to look at.  There are star birth regions, where hot young stars (and maybe planets?) are forming as we speak.  There are dark dust blots that could contain the seeds of stars that are just starting to form. And, there are stars that are dying.

Eta Carinae as imaged by the Gemini South telescope in Chile with the Near Infrared Coronagraphic Imager (NICI).

Specificially, there’s eta Carinae, which is the most luminous star in our galaxy and is just one massive explosion away from becoming a supernova. In fact, it could be such a powerful explosion, it could be what astronomers often refer to as a “hypernova.”  Astronomers think it’s going to go blooey! any time now — well, in astronomical terms, “any time” could mean tomorrow or it could happen in the next few thousand years.

Eta Carinae has been under a lot of observation for the past century and a half. It brightened unexpected in 1843 and stayed bright for about 20 years before fading down. It has probably done this a number of times before and since then, and that intense “flickering” is a clue to its death throes. We don’t often get to see stars this late in their lives. So, this presents astronomers with a good chance to study what hugely massive stars do as they thrash around on their deathbeds: they expell gas and dust, they brighten and dim, and they send powerful jets of material out to space. When eta Carinae does go, it’ll be bright and messy. The nebula will be affected, and our skies will have a bright new star for  months.

This month’s segment of The Astronomer’s Universe (in the player below) on Astrocast.TV takes a look at the latest images and ideas about the Carina Nebula and the activities of its crotchetiest stellar member. Check it out!  And, don’t forget to watch Our Night Sky and A Green Space, A Green Earth, also on Astrocast.TV.