I was wandering through the local supermarket this morning. Over the past year I haven’t been doing much of the grocery shopping since I’ve been on travel so much. So I was marveling at the sheer number of choices available on the market aisles. Who knew people needed so many choices for facial tissues? or body lotions? or varieties of cheese? or different ways to serve orange juice? I mean, you get regular, fresh-squeezed, fresh-frozen, low pulp, lots o’ pulp, low acid, low acid-no pulp, and so on. It’s truly amazing.

And, walking along in the soap aisle, I started comparing all the choices in laundry cleaners to the multiplicity of stars in the universe. There are so many kinds of laundry soap, but they all (essentially) do the same thing: clean your clothes.

Same with stars (no, they don’t keep your whites whiter and your darks darker). (And no, I’m not talking about tidal forces… ) The commonality of purpose among stars is to consume fuel in their cores during some part of their lives. That consumption is what causes stars to shine. Now, later in their lives, stars do different things (depending on their original mass). The most massive ones die as supernovae, blowing themselves to smithereens. Stars like the Sun just sort of go on until they run out of fuel and then swell up to become red giants, and then gradually shrink down to become white dwarfs. And the least-massive stars (the really small dwarfs) just shine away, locking away their elements for billions and billions and billions of years.

There is a link between stars and laundry soap that is kind of cool: if it wasn’t for stars, we wouldn’t have laundry soap. Or clothes, or bodies to wear the clothes, or a planet on which our bodies live. All the stuff we see around us had its start in a star… so think about THAT the next time you wander down the grocery store aisles pondering what brand of stuff to buy.

We live in amazing times. Every day you can download new images from space onto your computer and marvel at what’s out there. I like to turn them into wallpapers for my computer monitor. Usually I use space art, particularly from Digital Blasphemy. But, I also like to put up a really good astrophoto or artist’s conception of something from any of the many mission and space agency websites out there.

The image above is from the European Southern Observatory. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used it to illustrate a press release story about the numbers of red dwarf stars in our galaxy. You can read the full release here.

The best thing about all this? What you learn about astronomy and space when you browse the press releases that come with these great images!