Space Musings

Some stars take, some give.
Then there is the tortured relationship in EF Eridanus, where the smaller of two stars gave so much to its larger companion that it reached a dead end, and scientists said on Tuesday they haven't seen anything like it.
Doomed to orbit its more energetic partner for millions of years, the burned-out star has lost so much mass that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion at its core and has become a new, indeterminate stellar object, astronomers said in a statement.
"Like the classic line about the aggrieved partner in a romantic relationship, the smaller donor star gave, and gave, and gave some more until it had nothing left to give," said astronomer Steve Howell, who works with the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO telescope and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star," Howell said. "There's no true category for an object in such limbo."
The binary system EF Eridanus is made up of a recipient, a faint white dwarf star -- a sunlike star that has progressed to the final phase of its life -- and the donor object, which has about one-twentieth of our sun's mass.
It is located about 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus (The River). A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.
Howell and Thomas Harrison of New Mexico State University made high-precision infrared measurements of EF Eridanus using the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes, both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, in December 2002 and September 2003, respectively.
EF Eridanus is a type of binary star system known as magnetic cataclysmic variables, which may produce many more of these "dead" objects than scientists previously realized, Harrison said.
Images are available online at http:/www.gemini.edu/EFEriImages.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/05/space.star.reut/index.html

A co-worker showed me this story this morning. I am constantly awed by the grandeur and power of nature. Yesterday Mount St. Helen's warned us yet again that the time is near for another eruption by spewing some steam and ash and then there's this story. There are so many ways to look at this story and all I can really say is for me this story is spiritually amazing.

Perhaps the simplest way of saying what I want to say is by going back to my Christian roots and the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Here you have this guy who basically gives his all for mankind and eventually he dies and then he is transformed into something that is practically indescribable; he is no longer human, he becomes a god and even though we humans think we have a pretty good grasp about what it takes to be god, we really don't have a definitive answer. But the whole resurrection story is pretty remarkable.

Here we have something that is even more awesome than a transformed man; we have two colossal cosmological entities coming together to create something bigger and more noticeable than either could attain alone...and how do they do it? One gives off its energy and one receives that energy. People might wonder why a star...why any object in nature would let itself be drained of its energy, and yet this great star isn't dead. It's transformed into a gem that can't even be defined because of its unique state.

There are plenty of stories about parents sacrificing everything for their children; indeed, during the 911 tragedy we saw many people sacrificing themselves to save strangers. Those heroes, alive or otherwise, have been transformed into something far larger than they could have imagined. Perhaps these stars are a shining and more eternal symbol of how sacrifice changes the one who gives and the one who receives.

I'm not even going to attempt to write about how this all fits in to BDSM except to say when the power exchange is working well, the energy created and consumed by the people involved creates something that supercedes the power of one or two people. It is this sort of energy that gives life to the universe, transforming us from mere receivers of the universe's bounty and making us receptacles the universe can feed on so it can continue to freely give of its wealth. One awesome circle with so many mysteries that it will take mankind another several millennia to even come close to solving a single one of the mysteries completely.