Cosmos Episode 8 Thoughts

For tonight's show, there was not just one star, but many.  Billions and billions of them.  Those little lights in the sky have confounded and inspired mankind for as long as we have had thoughts in our head, but it took us a very long time to truly understand them.  I have to confess, I missed the first five minutes because I was out getting groceries (it was the earliest I could get them), but from what I gathered, the first segment was about ancients and how they organized the stars into constellations, making sense of a chaotic system.  I thought the Aborgine system was particularly interesting, instead of using the stars, they used the great dark patches of the Milky in the same fashion.  A different solution to the same problem, but it worked for them.

Next we moved to the 1920's, and the efforts of a group of women who catalogued the stars, creating a classification system still used today.  So far, this show has done a very good job of weaving the story of unknown scientists with the story of the universe around us, but I didn't think that was the case today.  We got their story in one block, which took 15 minutes and was over when the show hit the halfway point.  I think it was a story worth telling, but today, I don't think it was told in the best fashion.

Eta Carinae within the Homunculus Nebula

The second half of the show was all about the stars, namely, what their lives are like, and how stars die.  Stars like our sun die fairly peacefully and become white dwarfs, while bigger stars suffer a more violent fate.  The supernova is an incredible event, and if one occurs close to Earth, it can dominate the night sky.  But, a star can die in an even more spectacular fashion.  Personally, I knew immediately that Tyson was talking about Eta Carinae, so the big lead-up didn't do much for me, but I think that it was a very interesting topic nonetheless.  It's a fascinating star, and when it goes, it will be spectacular.

Speaking of spectacular, the show closed with an incredible image, and what would probably be one of the greatest sights in the whole universe.  On a far-off world orbiting a sun in a globular cluster, a ball of a million stars hovering around the Milky Way, there would be sunrises and sunsets just like any other planet, but there would also be galaxy-rise.  Just imagine watching the enormity of our entire galaxy rising over the dark horizon, with its 200 billion stars shining in the darkness.  It's an image that the first Cosmos also gave us, and it is still just as incredible image now as it was then.

From Cosmos. Still as majestic as ever

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