8/26/2023 0 Comments A path towards the stars“My mother was a near-teenage mother,” Long says. When Long sat outside with the stars and the ocean, she says, she did so because her mom was doing something inside that she was not allowed to see. It tells the story of a little boy who, with help from friends, faces abuse and darkness at home. One of the books she loves - and she’s read it three times now - is a novel called “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by the author Neil Gaiman. ![]() When not listening to galactic funk, Long also loves to read science fiction and fantasy books. It’s a story that crisscrosses the country, from the Keys to Rockville, to college at Towson University in Baltimore, where she began dating Patrick, to Los Angeles, to Santa Ana, to UCI and then, the other month, back to Rockville, where in her office she and Patrick keep a Lego model of the Millennium Falcon spaceship from the “Star Wars” film franchise on top of a bookshelf, just above a 1977 vinyl disco record called “Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk.” It was the memory of the Keys, now 16 years away, that Long, who’s a Black Jewish woman, pointed to as the start of her story. Then, what was a moment ago a chaotic cluster of lights, abruptly takes on new life, and the meaning of the night sky forever changes for the listener. The memory of that place, like a star in a constellation, is part of a broader story that remains nebulous until the person the story belongs to decides to point into the sky and tell you about it. She could see the Milky Way – the silver river of stars that arcs across the spine of the sky on clear nights, and which is the galaxy we call home – and she would see the equally endless ocean, and she would dream about one day becoming an underwater archeologist, exploring coral reefs around shipwrecks. It was in the Keys that Long sat outside and witnessed the universe. She’d just moved with her partner, Patrick, from UCI to Rockville, Maryland, which is the city she moved to when she was 12 with her mother from the Florida Keys. Long recalled this memory over a Zoom call in October. “I just felt so calm and so at peace and so centered,” she says. If the star is especially massive, when it explodes it forms a black hole.Once, when Arianna Long was a girl, she sat outside under the stars next to the ocean, and she looked out and felt the presence of something that today she describes as an immense, unknown void. These spin rapidly and can give off streams of radiation, known as pulsars. After the dust clears, a very dense neutron star is left behind. This material can collect in nebulae and form the next generation of stars. This scatters materials from inside the star across space. After many thousands of millions of years it will stop glowing and become a black dwarf.Ī massive star experiences a much more energetic and violent end. During these changes it will go through the planetary nebula phase, and white dwarf phase. What happens next depends on how massive the star is.Ī smaller star, like the Sun, will gradually cool down and stop glowing. All stars will expand, cool and change colour to become a red giant. The star then enters the final phases of its lifetime. Smaller stars use up fuel more slowly so will shine for several billion years.Įventually, the hydrogen which powers the nuclear reactions inside a star begins to run out. This means they may only last a few hundred thousand years. Very massive stars use up their fuel quickly. ![]() The exact lifetime of a star depends very much on its size. This stage is called the ' main sequence'. Nuclear reactions at the centre (or core) of a star provides energy which makes it shine brightly.
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