Skyward for March 2021. David H. Levy Stars are people too. In last month’s Skyward, I included that four-word phrase, but the first time I used it was actually in an article about the life of the star Betelgeuse, for Astronomy magazine. When I met Richard Berry, the editor at the time, he began by reciting those words: “Stars are people too.” He added that he accepted the article for publication in his magazine after he read those words. (It turns out that wasn’t my only unusual experience with that magazine. A few years later David Eicher, the current editor, and I witnessed a construction crew blowing up a freeway overpass near the magazine’s headquarters in Milwaukee.) As I explained last month, stars live out their lives much as do. They are born in gaseous stellar nurseries, or diffuse nebulae. In our sky two of the most famous nebulae appear are in summer, the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius, and in winter, the Orion Nebula. The little stars within the nebula vary in brightness, usually by a few tenths of a magnitude, but they can change quite quickly. There are a few others in the Hyades star cluster in Taurus, the […]
