star dust

There are over 400 billion stars in the Universe: as many as there are grains of sands on all the oceans on earth. What are these distant glistening things that fascinate us so much, that grasp our attention and capture our awe and wonder? I don't know about you but I am bewildered by stars, their mere existence, their life cycle and the magnanimity and scale that is so incomprehensible to us with our limited and finite concept of time and space. The nearest star system to the earth after the sun is Alpha Centauri which is about 4.5 light years away, it is a binary star system meaning it is actually made up of two stars. The night sky is speckled with stars and their diamond shine which left them millions of years ago and when we look at them we are actually looking back in time. Space, then, is a mirror of past which can be studied to understand how our planet came to be and how we evolved and whether we are alone in the Universe or not. The stars are usually huge in size, our sun is a million times bigger than our earth and they are made up of fire, of constant nuclear fissions taking place in their cores that keep radiating heat and light, and this process goes on till the time they burn off all their fuel and turn into a bloated red giant. In about 5 billion years our sun will become extremely hot and eventually start to get bigger and bigger and as it does so it will gulp down the solar system in it due to its tremendous gravitational pull. Then as time will pass it will burn itself off and turn into a white dwarf which is basically a dead star and finally the core will become so dense that all the matter that filled the star will pin down to a space smaller than this earth, and the gravitational pull of this abyss will be so strong that nothing would be able to escape from it, not even light - it will turn into a black hole! The Universe is full of these enigmas which are so powerful that they can pull anything within them and it will not be able to come out, what is inside the black holes remains a mystery so far. When I look into the night sky, what do I see besides a bejewelled mystical enchanted horizon? I see another world on a different level, it is vast but not elusive, it is distant but not unreachable, it is mysterious but not inexplicable. Somehow, in some odd way I feel an affinity to this world beyond worlds - interestingly I am told that we are made of stardust, the atoms that once made stars and and planets now form a part of my body and once I am not there will become either rock or plant or animal, such are the changes of this mysterious world. The ultimate frontier is that of space and time... will we ever discover what is beyond the universe which is visible to us through the microscope or is it limited to just that? I want to know what else the stars have on them or what is their fate going to be and if we are seeing them today as they were eons ago what do they look like now today?