Betelgeuse Goes Bang?

I love the rainy season, but I miss the night sky.

Like many of you, I've been a stargazer most of my life. I think it's just in us. We're a narrative species. We draw meaning and sustenance from the world around us - the grand metaphors of being, and with the possible exception of the ocean, there has never been a more expansive template for contemplation than the night sky.

The daytime sky presents its answers forthrightly. The big yellow bastard up there gives us heat and light. It makes the flowers and the berries grow. It provides us with life. But the night sky is inherently more sublime. What's the point of it but to sleep, perchance, to dream?

And why, why, why, why, why is there a seemingly random pattern of lights up there that never change? They're totally random, but they persist, steadfastly, not just over our lifetimes but - as far as any early civilization could tell - for all the lifetimes since the world began?

Why?

I think something had to kick off our quest for knowledge beyond the survival needs of what we're having for supper and where we're spending the night - and I'll happily lay down my marker on the mysteries of the randomized but consistent night sky.

I think that nagging, persistent question: "What the hell is it trying to tell us???" is what instigated our quest beyond self.

"What lessons are we meant to draw from this giant Rorschach test in the light-pricked Stygian dome?"

It must have driven early humans mad! And I mean the REALLY early ones. The ones who became the first shaman and shanachies and mystics and priests. They ones who saw into the deep.

The early observers - tens if not hundreds-of-thousands of years ago - likely started grouping them into what became known as constellations long before they noticed the more subtle patterns of zodiacal, sidereal, and planetary motion. They probably just looked up and said, "That kinda looks like a Bear, right? A Big Bear," or "When you think about it, those stars up there could be a great hunter holding a club and a shield."

One of my favorite Native American constellatory stories (I think it is Cree Nation, but I can't recall the direct citation) is of Original Man and Original Woman. Original Man is roughly the same star pattern that Europeans call the Big Dipper. Original Woman is the "W" constellation that the Ancient Greeks called Cassiopeia. Both star patterns are "circumpolar" in the Northern Hemisphere - which means two things. First, they're always visible in the night sky, no matter what time of year, and second, they tend to "chase" one another around Polaris - the pole star. In the story, and such a sensible story it is, the constant chase of man after woman and woman after man drives the whole damn narrative of our species.

(Though, we'll note, with joy, that as there is room on earth for LGBTQ+ lives and passions, there is room for LGBTQ+ stories in the sky, as well.)

Still, the great wheel of creation, driven by that chase, is a wonderful example of how humans use that randomized, unchanging template of stars to explain ourselves to ourselves as we live and love and toil in their narrative light.

So, yeah. I miss the night sky in the rainy season, and like any star-nerd worth his Himalayan Salt, I often content myself in the evening by watching YouTube vids from astronomers who share the passion - and I learned something today that is just way, way, way, way, way too cool not to share with all of you.

Recently, Hideyuki Saio and colleagues at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, published a paper entitled "The Evolutionary Stage of Betelgeuse Inferred from its Pulsation Periods," which - if correct - means the night sky, which has remained almost entirely static for thousands of years, is about to undergo a massive transformation.

As many of you know, Betelgeuse is a red giant star in the constellation of Orion - that giant hunter with the club and a shield - visible in the northern hemisphere from the fall to the spring. The name Betelgeuse derives from the Arabic "bat al-jawzā," which means "Shoulder of the Giant," or in a more fanciful translation I heard years ago and cannot forget, "The Armpit of the Central One."

Astronomers have been aware of Betelgeuse's significant dimming and brightening for decades. There is consensus that it is reaching the end of its lifecycle and will "soon" enter an explosive period known as a supernova. This is cool, of course, but as most of the research has predicted that the dramatic event will happen sometime in the next 100,000 years, sorta . . . meh.

But Saio's paper, based on new research that analyzes the amount of carbon left in the star's core, indicates that we could see the event within the next few DECADES - which means that plenty of us might still be alive when it happens! And, oh my god, I couldn't possibly express how very much I wanna be one of them!

I so want to see this before I die!

In Ancient Egypt, the constellation of Orion had a different name. To the Pharaohs and all the Remtju ni Kemet - the People of the Black Land - Orion was called Sah, the Father of the Gods. Now, as many of you will recall, three stars serve as the "belt" of Orion - Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Yet, to the Ancient Egyptians, the "Belt of Orion" was called "The Duat of Sah" and it was believed to be a literal passageway in the sky through which souls needed to travel to attain the afterlife.

This was such an important story that the Ancient Egyptians laid out the foundations for the Pyramids of Giza in the same dimensions and pattern as Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka in the sky. They literally built a Duat of Sah on Earth. Inside the Great Pyramid itself, from the King's Chamber, there is a channel carved in the stone that, at the Summer Solstice, pointed directly at the Duat of Sah in the sky so that the Pharaoh could meditate on the trajectory his soul must take to be reunited with the Gods upon his death - and, if he aimed just right, his resurrection.

Which takes me back to the first people who ever looked up and wondered, "What the hell does that mean? It's random but always the same. It MUST be trying to tell me something."

And that thing - that unknown, puzzling, maddening thing led human beings to speculate and story-tell until they'd built entire civilizations around the mysteries above. The Great Pyramids themselves - and the Temples of Angkor Wat, and the mounds of the builders the Mississippi River Valley, and so many other massive ancient structures, were built to map those random, meaning-rich stories on Earth!

Even if we have long since abandoned the beliefs that drove those massive projects, the civilizations that built them were part of an unending process of narratively driven scientific advancement. These first stories led to our navigation systems, our explorations of this Seven Seas, and even the worlds up above. It drove the quest for optics and physics and the chemistry that would one day grow so nuanced that a human being in Japan - along with his colleagues - could suss the relative amounts of carbon remaining in the core of a Red Giant star over 600 light years away.

And their work gives us hope - it gives ME hope - that we might live to witness something entirely new in the unchanging, mystifying, ennobling night sky – the ennobling sky through which all our stories find their origins, and from which all our narratives of spirit and purpose derive.

Here's to the burning lights above and within.

Love to you all.