Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae
The Stellar Organism
The birth, catalytic metabolism, periodic physiological cycles, and death of a star finger the luminary as an organism.
Think
you're Bright?
Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/ |
In
his book, "In
the Beginning
However, as eager as Gribbin is to assign the status of living thing to the Milky Way, he is less generous when it comes to individual stars. As dynamic and lively as they are in terms of their internal processes, stars themselves do not qualify as living things, he contends. "The life processes that create and maintain the spiral structure in disk galaxies start with stars," Gribbin acknowledges. He goes on to note that stars possess a trait distinctive of living things: "A star like our sun is itself, of course, in a state far from equilibrium." But we should not be misled by that fact: "Not even the keenest enthusiast for the Gaia hypothesis would argue that the sun is alive in the way that the Earth and the Milky Way are alive, because the sun is doing the best it can to reach equilibrium."
Gribbin’s dismissive characterization reveals a bias in the scientific view. The sun and all the other stars may be succumbing to entropy—rolling down the slope of potential energy toward equilibrium—despite their best efforts, just as are all of us who find ourselves past midlife and continuing to age. But stars exhibit such a striking number of characteristics associated with living organisms, including self regulation through feedback control, that a reconsideration seems justified. The star larvae hypothesis extends the notion of being alive specifically and explicitly to stars.
The case for the lives of stars relies on the similarity between the processes that drive biology and those that drive stellar physics. Animals maintain themselves in a far-from-equilibrium state by releasing chemical energy from the nutrients that they consume. Stars maintain themselves by releasing nuclear energy from the atomic nuclei that they consume. Like organisms, stars use the released energy to maintain their bodily structures in a state of stable disequilibrium
Stellar metabolism is a system of nuclear fusion (anabolic) and fission (catabolic) reactions that maintain the gross structures and processes of stellar anatomy and physiology. Newborn stars consume hydrogen nuclei, protons, exclusively. The processes that fuse these protons into the nuclei of all the other atoms occur by various but specific routes. Inside stars, nuclear reactions, such as the proton-proton chain, the triple alpha process, and the CNO cycle, build up the larger atomic nuclei from individual protons. The general term for this process is nucleosynthesis.
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"The most useful tool astronomers have for studying the way stars change as they age is called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, after the two astronomers who pioneered its use. Stars live for so long and change so slowly, by and large, that there is no hope of studying stellar evolution by watching an individual star or two age. But the H-R diagram enables astronomers to do the equivalent of a botanist who studies a forest of trees that includes seedlings, saplings, and mature specimens and uses those studies to work out the life cycle of a tree." —
John Gribbin |
The preponderance of the various nuclear reactions relative to one another varies with the age of a star, a situation that parallels metabolic changes that occur in biological organisms as they age. A newborn star fuses individual protons into proton pairs, which are the nuclei of helium atoms. This process is called hydrogen burning and dominates nucleosynthesis in young stars. Eventually insufficient numbers of free protons remain to keep this process going, but sufficient numbers of helium atoms have been created for the star to shift into a hotter, helium-burning phase. This nucleosynthetic process fuses helium nuclei into carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and other larger atoms. Eventually a star will burn carbon and larger atoms and produce yet larger ones, with iron defining the upper size limit of atoms that are formed through the metabolic processes that dominate the life of a typical star. Shorter-lived but more energetic processes are responsible for producing atoms heavier than iron. These processes take place during the explosive, high-energy events that constitute the death throes of a star.
In a star
bigger than the sun, a peculiar thing happens during the hydrogen burning
phase. If the particle cloud from which the star condensed includes sufficient
amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, the star will initiate a mode
of hydrogen burning called the CNO cycle, in which it fuses hydrogen nuclei
into helium nuclei through a catalytic process. Catalysis is a transformative
process that organic metabolisms use to manage their chemical reactions.
Catalysis relies on intermediaries that participate in reactions but remain
unchanged. An example from biology is the use of enzymes. Certain kinds
of enzymes will bond to particular molecules, introduce those molecules
to others, then detach themselves from the molecules that they have joined,
emerging from the reaction unchanged.
During the catalytic CNO cycle, isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen
exchange protons and emit subatomic particles through radioactive decay
in a specific sequence of transformations that yields helium from an initial
union of hydrogen and carbon. Each time a helium nucleus is emitted from
the process it leaves behind the original carbon isotope, which is then
free to bond with another hydrogen nucleus—proton—to begin
the cycle again. The process is a true catalysis. When the manufactured
helium is released, the initiator of the process remains.
Notice the elements involved in the CNO cycle: carbon, nitrogen,
and oxygen, interacting with hydrogen. This group of elements, sometimes
designated by the abbreviation CHON, constitutes up to 90 percent of the
mass of biological protoplasm. It is surely a strange coincidence that
this small set of elements plays starring roles in the catalytic metabolisms
of both biological organisms and stars. A priori, there is no
reason to think that their nuclear and chemical properties would link
them in such a way. The star larvae hypothesis interprets the coincidence
as suggestive of a family tie.
But a complex metabolism is just one attribute that stars share with organic
life. Stars also possess an internal arrangement of dynamically interacting
subsystems by means of which, or in the service of which, the metabolism
proceeds. These subsystems constitute the anatomy of the star. The material
and energetic exchanges among the subsystems constitute a star’s
physiology.
A star is not a homogeneous blob of hot gas. It is an organized structure
of discernable components arranged and interacting with one another in
definite ways. The sun, as a typical example, comprises, anatomically,
an inner core within which nucleosynthesis occurs, a radiative layer that
carries energy out from the core by radiation, and a convective layer
that carries the energy further by convection. This onionlike structure
continues outward from the core to the periphery with the photosphere,
the chromosphere, and, at the outer fringes, the diffuse corona.
This layered body plan is maintained dynamically by a set of physiological processes. The photosphere, for example, includes structures that solar physicists call granules, which are the tops of convection cells that cover the sun. The convection cells underlying the granules constitute a circulatory system that shuttles material between the interior and the surface of the solar body. At the surface the fluid material circulates according to multiple flow components (rotation, cellular convection, oscillations, and meridional flows).The granules themselves compose supergranules, whose fluid motions concentrate magnetic fields to produce a weblike pattern of field lines—the chromospheric network—that continually evolves over the sun’s surface. The photospheric circulatory system includes magnetic field markers—the familiar sunspots—and the smaller, brighter spots called faculae. A system of interlocking processes is at work here to maintain a discernable, complex structure in a state of stable disequilibrium and that exhibits a level of complexity suggestive of a biological system.
And, as with
biological systems, a star's internal processes are cyclic. Physiological
cycles of organisms include the familiar respiratory, estrus, and circadian
rhythms of animals. Gaia, too, pulses according to interwoven rhythms:
tidal, seasonal, glacial, and other. The sun exhibits the same tendency.
Its rhythms include the well-studied eleven-year sunspot cycle, along
with a 76-year oscillation in its volume. NASA’s orbiting SoHo observatory
during the 1990s revealed a rapid five-minute cycle of helioseismographic
activity—of sound waves resonating through the body of the sun (for
more details, see "Solar
and Stellar Activity Cycles
Stars and
biological organisms both also depend on feedback to achieve homeostasis,
or internal stability. The sun uses feedback controls specifically to
maintain its internal temperature, which must remain within a limited
range to keep it viable. If the sun were to cool excessively, it would
implode under its own gravity. If it were to heat up excessively, it would
fly apart. The sun keeps blazing because its tendency to expand—an
effect of its heat—is countered precisely by its tendency to contract—an
effect of its gravity. The temperature range that balances these two countervailing
forces happily corresponds to the range that keeps nucleosynthesis proceeding
in an orderly fashion.
Despite the foregoing, at least one essential biological process
has no obvious counterpart in the lives of stars. That process is reproduction.
The star larvae hypothesis fills the gap by accounting for the stellar
reproductive cycle.
The theory
of cosmological natural selection, in which black holes spawn new
universes, potentially accounts for the reproductive cycle of universes.
As for stars themselves, the issue of reproduction is addressed, ostensibly,
by the standard scientific model of the stellar "life cycle."
When stars die, they do so explosively, expelling their bodily material
into the space around them. The death leaves behind a dense core, which
persists as a brown dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, depending on the
size of the original star. The material that is ejected enriches the nearby
interstellar clouds, from which new stars form. This recycling of material
from one generation of stars to the next resembles reproduction. But
it resembles the fertilization of roots more than it does the production
of seeds. It is an incomplete reproductive cycle. The seeds of
stars are unattached protons. The recycling of material from old stars
into new ones does not produce new protons.
The star larvae hypothesis proposes that stars reproduce in a way that
more nearly resembles biological reproduction, insofar as the stellar
reproductive cycle is divisible into discernable stages, all of which
participate in the succession of stellar generations.
The hypothesis proposes that the stellar body is the adult phase of a
developmental program that includes a larval phase, which, like some biological
larvae, bears little resemblance to the adult. The larval phase of the
stellar life cycle unfolds on planetary surfaces. The developing larvae
exploit the material resources of planets, and the larval population eventually
differentiates to produce a type, which on Earth calls itself Homo
sapiens, that is uniquely adapted (programmed) to carry the stellar
life cycle into its next phase. This avant-garde type rapidly converts
the material resources of the planet into complex environments—cities.
It develops symbiotically with its evolving technologies as it does so
and becomes highly domesticated—neotenous. Eventually,
the complex symbiotic environments are manufactured in the orbital space
around the incubator planet, enabling the larvae to occupy a new—extraterrestrial,
weightless—ecological niche and commence the next stage of the life
cycle.
Researchers, called anthropologists, who study the habits of
Homo Sapiens testify to a peculiar behavior that betrays an intuition
of the metamorphosis to come. As if by precognition, the larvae fashion
images of themselves as glowing and airborne. Larval
lore points to the sky as the abode of "enlightened" fellows,
a place and condition to which larval institutions, called religions,
admonish adherents to aspire. While the drive to join the celestial
illuminati of myth expresses itself through religious art, the drive to
join the celestial illuminati of the physical sky—the stars—inspires
rocket scientists.
Spicules:
Jets on the Sun
Credit: SST, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, LMSAL
Explanation: Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun. Pictured above is perhaps the highest resolution image yet of these enigmatic solar flux tubes. Spicules dot the above frame of solar active region 10380 that crossed the Sun in June, but are particularly evident as a carpet of dark tubes on the right. Time-sequenced images have recently shown that spicules last about five minutes, starting out as tall tubes of rapidly rising gas but eventually fading as the gas peaks and falls back down to the Sun. These images also indicate, for the first time, that the ultimate cause of spicules is sound-like waves that flow over the Sun's surface but leak into the Sun's atmosphere.
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