Life Changes: a star is born by Jennie Hart

I do not have a single memory of my birth or know if I was ever born. I feel as if I have always been here, as a glorious, tiny, dusty nebula!  My neighbouring nebula says I am apparently not that small; she tells me I am massive, something approximating a trillion or even several trillion miles in diameter.

Yes I am round, I am a ball, an enormous ball of gas, bursting with hydrogen and helium and smatterings of unidentifiable detritus. Sometimes, I can see my reflection in other nebulae and I am amused to observe my fuzzy appearance. I am, to put it simply, a ball of fluff! A fluff ball!

My neighbour describes us as star factories and recently we have both begun to recognise uncomfortable changes. Throughout my existence I have been obscenely hot and disgustingly heavy. My whole being is regularly oppressed by a great weight, and my neighbour calls this gravity. Yet sometimes, my interior surges outwards in gigantic shudders so that I think I am going to explode. When this happens, I know I am I am trying to fight this ghastly gravity because for a time, I feel like the fluffy ball I know I really am.

Today I am experiencing life threatening changes. I am becoming heavier and heavier and I no longer feel fluffy; I am condensed and solid and searingly hot. My heat is so intense that my cooler neighbour declares my temperature to be ten million degrees Celsius.  She says that I am giving birth! To a Star! I am to become a stellar creature, boiling and bursting with nuclear reactions. My nebulousness pulsates as I convert hydrogen into helium and explode with energy.

Yes, a star is to be born! It is very exciting but I am still not sure what I am. My ever-knowing neighbour says a star is a brilliant luminous globe of heat and light, glowing from the heat I release when I convert my hydrogen to helium.

The wise one is keen to give advice. ‘Take note’ she says, ‘You will not be a star forever. Your life is destined to be forever changing. Unimaginable transformations are in store! You may in time have a relatively peaceful and beautiful death and become a dense white dwarf. Alternatively, you may have an energetic and violent end and be scattered about the cosmos in a violent explosion. That will mean you have become a super-nova. Even that will not be your finale; you are destined afterwards to fade into a neutron star or, at the very worst, condense into a black hole!

I am puzzled and curious but my neighbour is calling me again. She is looking dishevelled and out of control.

‘What further revelations I have just heard! Listen and learn’ she says. ‘Great and astonishing news is spreading across the cosmos! It concerns gravitational waves that expand and squeeze space! A black hole may not be our final manifestation. If we cannot escape each other’s gravity, we may come together in an unbelievably violent collision and become a disc of swirling death, a distorted mess of matter. We could be destined to combine to become a binary black hole and be forever united!

I am full of fear and wonder and have many more questions, but the oracle is silencing me.

‘Keep your questions for another eon.’ she commands.’ Your time has come. Go, and for now, be a star; my stardom will follow but who knows what a future we may have together!’