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Shrunken Giants, Swelling Dwarfs Shrunken Giants, Swelling Dwarfs
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The black hole in the photo contributes to the formation of stars a million kilometers away. Source: X-ray: NASA / CXC / INAF / R. Gilli et al; NRAO / VLA radio; Optical: NASA / STScI
Outer Space

Shrunken Giants, Swelling Dwarfs

The Life Cycle of Stars
Piotr Stankiewicz
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time 10 minutes
Piotr Stankiewicz:
A writer and philosopher, the creator and teacher of reformed Stoicism.

Stars have their own life cycle: they are born, change, and die, often bringing to life another star. And on it goes . . . 

Although this text is devoted to the evolution of stars, the first explanation is not related to astronomy but to semantics. This is necessary because the concept of evolution means something different than in the context of Darwin’s theory. Biological evolution refers to changes occurring within a certain species over the course of thousands and millions of generations. The evolution of stars is different because it refers to the life cycle of a single star—from birth until death. Stars have no DNA and are not regulated by the fundamental principle of the animate world, namely that “like generates like.” They do not inherit, fight for existence, or partake in the survival of the fittest. The evolution of stars is a term that has been accepted in astrophysics, but it would probably be more accurate to employ the more poetic term “life of stars,” or, to borrow straight from Ovid, “metamorphoses of stars.”

There is a second introductory remark that needs to be made. How do we even know how it all works if the lifespan of stars so greatly exceeds the temporal scope of our studies? We do not observe the evolution of stars directly, not to mention the fact that

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Piotr Stankiewicz:
A writer and philosopher, the creator and teacher of reformed Stoicism.
Translation: Grzegorz Czemiel
Publish date: 18.06.2021

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Science

Baby Earth, Infant Sun

The Life of Stars and Planets
Łukasz Lamża
Łukasz Lamża:
is a philosopher of nature who writes popular scientific articles, particularly in “Tygodnik Powszechny”. He’s specifically trained in astrophysics and cosmology, but fortunately he sometimes comes down to Earth.

The young sun cavorts wildly about, and the just-formed planet spits out magma like a spoiled little boy. In their old age they’ll fall into torpor, cooling down, and their frozen remnants will wander through the galaxy for eons. A strained analogy—or is there more to it?

Metaphor is a great tool for ordering reality. That’s because we juxtapose one domain with another, which immediately makes us sensitive to the similarities between them—as well as the differences. When somebody tells me I’m just like my father, there’s a good chance that, in my vehement denial of this inappropriate accusation, I’ll learn a lot about myself. When in the first half of the seventeenth century Descartes suggested quite seriously that the world is like a mechanism, and in the second half of that century Newton expressed this precisely, scientists and philosophers threw themselves into alternately confirming and refuting this metaphor. After several centuries of such struggles, we can now say quite a bit about the degree to which the world resembles a wound-up watch and the degree to which it doesn’t.

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