NOVA: “The Universe: The Age of Stars” (WGBH, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of quite interesting nature programs on KPBS, a NOVA episode called “The Age of Stars” and a Secrets of the Dead called “Lady Sapiens.” The NOVA episode – preceded, as usual, with an acknowledgment of funding by the “David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science” (as opposed to the David H. Koch PAC’s for the Trashing of Science, which gave oodles of money to candidates who don’t believe in human-caused climate change) – was actually quite interesting and surprising even though most of the graphics were computer-generated. It was centered around the launch of something called the Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft which has actually been launched towards the sun – though really it’s an artificial planet designed to make at least 12 orbits around the sun, getting closer each time and measuring the composition and heat levels of the solar atmosphere (which for some reason is actually hotter than its surface). The intent of the probe is to find out more not just about the specific composition and mechanics of the sun (remember that, like all stars, the sun is essentially a giant nuclear fusion reactor) but to extrapolate that to all stars. The main business of the show, however, was to present a vision of the history and likely future of the universe that, if anything, made humans seem even smaller and less important than we did before.

The title “The Age of Stars” refers to the history of the universe as modern astrophysicists have reasoned, in which after the Big Bang the universe was pretty much without form and void for about half a billion years until it started forming something called “The Cosmic Web,” in which the only chemical elements were hydrogen and helium and these gases (or plasmas, or whatever) formed giant tendrils that eventually came together to form stars. The first stars, according to this explanation, were so-called “blue giants” that dwarfed any of the stars we know and ran out of hydrogen fuel relatively quickly, breaking apart as they died but forming other chemical elements from the crashing-together of hydrogen and helium atoms and eventually becoming the bases of the stars we know, some of which in turn threw off planets. What made this even more depressing than most depictions of the likely history of the universe – and this was something I hadn’t known anything about before – is that the Age of Stars is drawing to a close and over the next trillion years or so all the stars we know, including our own, will burn out. When the last star dies the universe will be nothing more than a bunch of giant rocks floating around in space that used to be stars when they still had hydrogen to fuel their fusion reactions. That makes us feel even more irrelevant to the cosmos than we did before – and the idea that stars aren’t permanent and someday the universe will be totally without them seems bizarre and intimidating to me. I had always assumed that stars were like people – they would go through a life cycle and die out eventually, but new stars would form and replace them – but apparently we’ve already reached the point of no return and the reproductive rate of stars has already passed its peak and is slowing down.