Stellar Resurrection
Image from Flickr. Courtesy of Ted.
Happy Easter! It’s that time of year when we get to celebrate a bunch of dicks murdering a demonstrably nice man, who then proved himself to be something of a wizard by being all like, “Fuck you! I’m not gonna be dead anymore, I’ve done it for two days, and it’s shit. Your shit. Let me move this rock. JC is back!” Then, in the ultimate troll move, he went and chose to sort of die anyway. But on his own terms! Ain’t no toga-wearing douchebags going to tell JC what to do. If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I know absolutely nothing about the story of Easter. I think at some point someone gave me a run-through, but I have a habit of imagining the bible as the world’s oldest superhero comic book as soon as people start quoting all the supernatural shenanigans. I’m much more interested in super, natural shenanigans! Like a wood frog that lives in Canada which freezes completely solid in the winter and then melts in the summer and just cracks on with frog-related activities like it’s no big deal.
Another example is stars. The very nature of stars, and their immense energy output, has them constantly sitting on the brink of chaos and ruination. In about 5 billion years, the Sun will cross that line into ruination, and then about a billion years later it will bounce back over the line: just like Jesus Christ and the wood frogs did before it. That bounce-back is marked by a release of energy equal to the output of an entire galaxy of stars. It’s called a helium flash, and it happens without a disciple or a bunny noticing a damn thing.
I want to go back to our little wood frog friend for a second. Her yearly cycle of chilling out and then frantically hopping around to find a reproductive partner is a dance performed at the behest of the Sun. Actually, it’s at the behest of the Earth and which way it's pointing, but it’s about the Sun’s rays, at least. Sometimes the wood frog has access to a surplus of rays, in which case she hops and humps. And when the Sun’s energy dwindles, she gets all frosty and still. This is all fine, but what really grinds my gears is that I know if I were to ask Shailene wood frog where that energy, that she is so very dependent on, comes from she’d probably say something ignorant and dismissive like “Ribbit” or worse… “Ribbit”. Do you know who else would find that annoying? Albert Einstein. And not just because he was notoriously against frogs using such foul language, but also because she would be neglecting to acknowledge his most famous equation in the process. Ribbit = mc^(ribbit)
Translated from frog: Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. This is it. This is the equation that explains why Shailene has enough energy landing on her to keep her out of a permafrost. The Sun turns matter (stuff) into energy, and it does it at a rate of roughly one Great Pyramid of Geyser a second. A pyramid’s worth of stuff transformed into light. Light that might land on the Earth as Sheliene’s wake-up alarm or a British person’s worst enemy/sorely missed friend.
The Sun transforms mass into energy by pushing a swirling ocean of protons (essentially Hydrogen atoms) together really, really hard. Eventually, the protons have no other choice but to pair up. Like any good couple, their union has them abandoning personal baggage and each of them loses a little mass, making the final product of 2 protons a little bit lighter than 1 proton + 1 proton. With this marriage of matter, our two protons are well on their way to becoming something much more interesting than Hydrogen. They’re being upgraded into something that, when inhaled, can provide extraordinary comedic opportunities that will almost certainly be ruined by laughing before you actually say anything funny. I’m talking about Helium.
Bigger unions of protons (bigger atoms) are more difficult to squish together than the Hydrogen we start with. The Sun for example, despite having so many obvious parallels with Jesus, is not able to fuse Helium into something bigger by being morally righteous alone. What it needs is more heat, and more pressure pushing the Helium atoms together. To find this extra strength, it must surrender to a greater power, gravity.
In 5 billion years the Sun will exit the ‘Main Sequence’ phase of its life, defined as the phase where it's converting Hydrogen into Helium. As you can imagine, with that Helium not being refashioned into something bigger, it starts to pile up. Meanwhile, the stocks of Hydrogen begin to diminish. The point where the Sun runs out of Hydrogen to squeeze energy out of is the line of ruin that I spoke of early. You see, the Sun wants to collapse. Its gravitational pull is tremendous, it's pulling the outer edges of the Sun inward so strongly that the only force that is able to hold it up is the mass of one Pyramid of Geyser’s-worth of energy gushing out in the opposite direction every second. When the Hydrogen runs out, so do the pyramid conversions and everything starts to crunch inward.
As the Sun collapses, more pressure is exerted on what has now become a sea of swirling Helium in the centre of the star. The pressure soon builds to a point where the sea of Helium becomes more like a giant diamond, where the Helium atoms are packed in so tightly they can barely move and are now held up by quantum forces that prevent them from invading each other’s space any further. The quantum force is called ‘degeneracy pressure’ and the core is so regarded as being ‘degenerate’ (a good way of describing those damn Romans). Eventually, the collapse of the Sun evolves so far that the temperature does get high enough to start fusing Helium. The addition of Helium fusion energy to this melting pot causes the temperature to go up further. Normally the star’s core would naturally expand, as expansion is a good method for dissipating heat. However, degenerate cores have this weird property where they don’t expand as they heat up, so the core just keeps getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter, and hotter.
With every increase in temperature, the rate of Helium’s conversion to energy increases as well. Initiating a runaway reaction of heating and fusion, leading to more heating and fusion that reaches a point where you have not one Great Pyramid’s worth of energy being released every second, but hundreds of millions. This is the helium flash: one last effort of resurrection for a star dead on its ass without fuel. We would not see the flash observing from outside the Sun. All the energy is directed into lifting the core out of its cramped, diamond state and back into a swirling sea. The Sun will already be in a pretty weird place by the time the Helium flash occurs. It will have expanded to nearly the orbit of the Earth. Swollen and red, it will no longer be the best host to a life-supporting planet like ours. But even in its death throes, we could not deny the epic nature of a power very much bigger than us. All we can do is sit back, eat chocolate, and tell stories about beautiful and transient things that sometimes die. But sometimes, whether for sin or the sake of sun, come back to life.
