THE RIDDLE OF THE STARS

compiled by Dee Finney

updated 3-9-08

Has anyone ever asked you what sign you are, or said they didn’t get along with someone because they were a Sagittarius? Good morning/afternoon honorable judges, special guests, members of the faculty and fellow students. My name is Catherine and today I’d like to welcome you to the world of horoscopes. I’m sure many of you have a vague idea of what horoscopes are. In the newspaper you can usually find a small section with predictions of the day, week, or month for each sign. You may think that it’s all a bunch of bologna but that’s not the whole picture. Your horoscope or sign of the zodiac can actually tell you more about your personality than your future. What you may believe comes very close to the mark but it doesn’t include every aspect of horoscopes or a more familiar term, astrology. Today I plan to introduce you to many aspects of astrology including the signs of the zodiac, their history, and also an insight into another form of astrology.

In Western astrology, the horoscope is divided into twelve signs; Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. These twelve signs are also divided into elements and qualities. The elements are fire, earth, air, and water. The qualities are cardinal, fixed and mutable.

Your sign, element, and quality, among other things can determine quite a bit about your personality. Each sign is dominated by one or two of the heavenly spheres present in our Solar System, the planets, the Sun and the Moon. Your planet along with your date, place, and hour of birth all affect your personality and outlook on life.

Horoscopes do not only determine personality types but affect nature as well. Surprisingly enough, you can acquire tables indicating the best dates for fishing and gardening. Also in conjunction with the cycles of the Moon you can determine your lucky numbers.

All of this is really only half of astrology. The other is predictions. These are what you find in the newspaper and in magazines. You may have noticed that some of the messages differ. What you must take into consideration is that each of these are the interpretations of the zodiac by the astrologer. Each astrologer may take different meanings from their charts and also emphasize certain points while leaving out others. Most of us have discovered that on the occasion when we read our horoscopes, it usually has little to do with the course of the day until we unravel the riddle of the stars.

What I have spoken about so far is based on the Western interpretation of a zodiac based on a solar calendar. On the other side of the planet where many countries like China work on a lunar calendar, the system of the horoscope is some what different.

Oriental astrology has their twelve signs; The Rat, The Ox, The Tiger, The Rabbit, The Dragon, The Snake, The Horse, The Sheep, The Monkey, The Rooster, The Dog, and The Boar. Instead of governing the cycles of the moon as do Western Signs, the Oriental signs govern mainly the years and hours. This year, 1996, is the year of the Rat. The Oriental years I’m talking about are Lunar years; which do not start on January 1st. These years have a different starting date each year which is usually in February.

These horoscopes include the predictions and the personalities similar to Western horoscopes. They mention your personality based on the year and hour of your birth, along with your element (the elements are fire, metal, wood, water, and earth). They also include how you will act during the different years.

This basically sums up my knowledge on how horoscopes work. Now for their history. Astrology was invented in Babylonia but was carried off to different parts of the world where different but similar forms developed. The earliest dated horoscope was made in 409 B.C.E. By the fall of the Roman Empire, astrology lost its common place in the west but still had popularity in East. In the 12th century horoscopes once again gained popularity in the West but lost it again at the end of the 17th century. Now horoscopes are considered nonsense by most educated people.

Well, there you have it. Horoscopes in their entirety. I’ve spoken about their history, the signs of the zodiac, and the not-so-well-known Oriental Horoscopes. I hope you have enjoyed my oral and I also hope you have become more interested in the fascinating science of astrology. Thank you.

Freemasonry's Cosmic Cross and the American Revolutionaries

Astrological Clip Art

Exodus 2006

THE SCIENTIFIC BENT ON THE RIDDLE OF THE STARS

FROM: http://www.aspsky.org/mercury/ezine/zine30_02/zine30_02.html

Images Courtesy of NASA/SAO/CXC/Giuseppina Fabbiano et al. and NASA/CXC/SAO.

For more images, see the Chandra image gallery

If you zoom past the Virgo cluster and continue toward the north celestial pole for several billion light-years, you will come across a collection of odd galaxies that seems to shine only in X rays. Are these galaxies so far away that their visible light didn’t make it through the long, dusty voyage across the universe? Or are these actually protogalaxies, so young that they comprise only a central supermassive black hole and a swirl of hot X-ray-emitting gas in an era before starlight?

The verdict is still out. But whatever these objects are, we weren’t able to see them at all with any instrument before the launch of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in July 1999.

With an imaging capability at least 30 times sharper than any X-ray telescope before it, and four of the smoothest, cleanest mirrors ever made, Chandra is the 190-proof intoxicant putting hair on the chest of X-ray astronomy. Scientists at long last have a superior tool to study the structure and dynamics of the most energetic and enigmatic phenomena in the universe, such as black holes, supernovae, and neutron stars.

Chandra is the X-ray astronomer’s version of the Hubble Space Telescope, designed to provide detail of objects and events that have remained shaded in mystery for decades. One of Chandra’s first images, in fact, revealed what may be the long sought neutron star in the heart of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, some 11,000 light-years away. Radio, optical, and earlier X-ray telescopes had searched for this source to no avail.

NASA promised that the Chandra mission would be tantamount to finally seeing the universe through a good pair of X-ray eyeglasses. Chandra’s first year has proven this analogy lame. Toss the eyeglasses; Chandra grabs you by the arm and takes you to the scene of the crime.

This feature article also contains a sidebar about the European Space Agency’s answer to Chandra: The XMM-Newton mission. Another sidebar talks about astronomer Harvey Tananbaum, one of the key players who developed Chandra.

Fusion

How Stars Burn

Fire-folk sitting in the air. Diamond wells. Elf eyes. The poet’s images of the stars beckon us into the forest of the night, away from the security of the campfire or the porch light, into the darkness where 10,000 silver flecks are scattered across the black celestial cloths. We look up into the darkness as if into a mirror and see, as often as not, a human face: Orion, Cassiopeia, Perseus, Andromeda. The human mind has a powerful inclination to see the familiar in the unfamiliar, perhaps related to the tendency of the newborn child to instinctively fix on the mother’s face. What we do not want to see is the yawning inhuman chasm, the fearful solitude, the infinite multiplicity of worlds. However, what we wish for and what we know to be true are two different things, and Bruno and Galileo paid the price when their contemporaries failed to make the distinction. Galileo turned his telescope to the flowing river of the Milky Way and saw a myriad of faint lights glittering beyond the limits of human vision. Those uncountable suns were the first hint that the universe was not designed for human eyes

"The power of the visible is the invisible," said the poet Marianne Moore. The stars are other Suns, other fiery globes vastly larger than the Earth. All of this was known with confidence by the end of the nineteenth century. The distances to the stars had been measured, their true brightnesses determined. The Sun, it turned out, is quite an ordinary star—middling sized, middling temperature, a one-million-mile-wide sphere of gas, yellow hot, seething and churning with energy. Some stars are bigger and hotter than the Sun; some are smaller, cooler, less bright. Furthermore, by century’s end, geologists and biologists had determined that the Earth was tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of years old, and that its surface environment had not changed dramatically during all that time. Among the oldest geologic formations on Earth are rocks composed of marine sediments laid down on the floors of ancient oceans. If the Sun had been hotter during the planet’s youth, the oceans would have boiled away; if cooler, surface water would have frozen solid. The constancy of the fossil record also suggests a stable habitat for life. No matter how you thought about it, the evidence was unmistakable: The Sun has been burning rather steadily ever since the planet’s birth, pouring into space colossal quantities of heat and light.

And the problem—the biggest problem in science at the end of the nineteenth century—was this: No one had a clue about the source of the Sun’s energy. If the Sun was nothing but coal and oxygen, it would have long since burned to embers. Moreover, the Sun was manifestly not made of coal and oxygen; the light from the Sun has spectral characteristics of hydrogen and helium. Helium is an inert gas; no energy available there. Hydrogen? Chemists could think of no way to get energy from hydrogen in the absence of appreciable quantities of other elements. What about gravity? Could the squeeze of gravity keep the Sun hot? Physicists did the calculations; if gravity were squeezing out energy at the Sun’s present rate of energy production, the Sun would have shrunk noticeably even in historic times. The bottom line: No source of energy known to late-nineteenth-century scientists was adequate to explain starlight.

One evening in 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie put their children to bed and slipped away from their house in Paris. They walked through the still-busy streets to their laboratory, where for four years Marie had labored mightily to extract a fraction of a gram of a new element from tons of pitchblende ore from Czechoslovakia purchased with their meager savings. No government grants were available in those days for Curie’s research; no graduate students were there to help her with the backbreaking work. She rolled up her sleeves and spent her precious savings with the purest of motives: curiosity. She was convinced that an undiscovered element was hidden in those heaps of ore, like a needle in a haystack, and she was determined to find it. As she labored, she had wondered what the element she sought would look like. Would it be gray? Black? Shiny? Dull? The answer was unlike anything she might have guessed. As husband and wife entered the laboratory, Marie whispered, "Don’t light the lamps." She sat in a chair before the table that bore a sample of the new element in its glass container. The precious element glowed with a spontaneous light! "Look, look," Marie murmured ecstatically, as she gazed at the pale-blue glimmering. Her daughter Eve later called it "the evening of the glowworms."

Marie Curie did not know the source of the mysterious light that came from the stuff she named radium (from its radiance). Here was apparently inert matter that shed an apparently inexhaustible light. Soon her new element was all the rage, and Marie Curie was famous. People daubed their bodies with radium salts and danced like fireflies in darkened nightclubs. They sipped radium-laced cocktails that glowed in the dark. In clock factories, hundreds of young women painted radium salts onto the numerals of dials so that time could be read in the dark, moistening the tips of their brushes with their tongues. Such beauty! Nature’s fuelless fire, undying light. As Marie Curie sat with her husband in the darkened laboratory on that evening in 1902, she could not have dreamed that the light from radium had the same source as the light of the stars. Or that the beautiful glow that emerged from the glass container was accompanied by deadly invisible radiations.

The next piece of the puzzle fell into place in 1905. Albert Einstein, twenty-six years old, in Zurich, published three papers that shook physics to its foundations and won him a reputation as a whiz kid of European physics. One of those papers, titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," has been called the most famous scientific paper in history. It was the beginning of the theories of special and general relativity that Einstein elucidated over the following decade. A supplement to this paper stated for the first time the equivalence of matter and energy, expressed in the famous equation E=mc² (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). Einstein wondered if this might be the source of radium’s pale light, and his guess turned out to be accurate: In the spontaneous fissioning (breaking apart) of radium nuclei, mass is converted into pure luminous energy. The key to the apparently inexhaustible nature of nuclear energy lies in the factor c². The velocity of light is a very large number—186,000 miles per second; squared, an even larger number. A tiny bit of vanished mass yields a lot of energy. The radium in Marie Curie’s glass vials glows, and glows, and glows, and the diminishment of its mass is undetectable.

No sooner had Einstein published his equation than astronomers began to wonder if the Sun’s prodigious output of heat and light might be due to a conversion of matter into energy. For light elements, such as hydrogen and helium, energy is released when nuclei fuse. Perhaps in the fiery furnace of a star’s interior, hydrogen nuclei are fused into helium nuclei in a reaction that converts matter to energy. Perhaps that factor c² keeps the Sun shining steadily for hundreds of millions of years. But first, a lot of work needed to be done to confirm this intuition. Experiments had to be performed to demonstrate the transmutation of elements and the consequent diminishment of mass. Marie Curie’s daughter and son-in-law, Irene and Frédéric Joliet-Curie, played an important part in these investigations. In January 1934, as Marie lay dying of radiation-induced leukemia, her fingertips crumbling away from radiation poisoning, Irene and Frédéric showed her the first experimental evidence for the artificial production of radioactive energy. 

Before the end of the decade, the riddle of the stars had been solved.

No stars visible to the naked eye tease us more with the mystery of stellar life than the Pleiades, the unique cluster of faint stars we watched in the winter sky. If these stars were scattered at random across the sky, no one would take notice. They are together because they are young—only tens of millions of years old—and together they attract universal attention. The six stars you see with your unaided eye are only the brightest stars in the cluster. Binoculars reveal dozens of stars; telescopes show hundreds. Long-exposure photographs reveal an even more dazzling view: The brightest of the Pleiades are tangled in wisps of glowing gas. The entire gathering of stars is nested in a faint nebula, made incandescent by the light of the hottest blue stars. We see them still entangled in the swaddling clothes of their origin, a gassy nebula that gravity has gathered into a sisterhood of compact spheres.

The gassy environs of the Pleiades is the nearest of thousands of star-birthing regions in the arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. The cluster is 400 light-years distant, which places it in our own neighborhood of the Galaxy, but still far enough away to reduce the brightest Pleiades to near naked-eye invisibility. (If the cluster were as close as Sirius, we could read at night by the light of its hot blue stars.) If one had looked into this part of the sky 50 million years ago, one would have seen not stars but only a cloud of gas. The gas was mostly molecular hydrogen, although helium was prominent, and there were trace amounts of many other molecules—altogether thousands of molecules per cubic centimeter. This gas was a million billion times less dense than the air we breathe, but within the vast expanse of the cloud there was sufficient matter to make one thousand suns. And always, as everywhere in the universe, gravity was struggling to pull the stuff of the cloud together.

Let’s watch as a star is born. A dense knot of gas within the cloud—with a mass of one billion billion billion tons—begins to collapse, squeezed by gravity into an ever smaller sphere. The temperature of the sphere soars, especially at its center. Molecules of paired hydrogen atoms disengage, and then, as the temperature rises, the components of the hydrogen atoms—the proton and electron—are ripped apart. The core of the newly forming star is a blazing sea of protons and electrons. Protons have positive electric charge, and like charges repel. Within the sea of darting particles, the protons keep their distance from one another, approaching and dashing away like bees in a swarm. (The electrons too are dashing about on their own.) But as gravity squeezes further and the temperature continues to climb, the darting protons, moving ever more speedily, get closer and closer before they are mutually repelled. As the temperature at the core reaches 10 million degrees, protons approach near enough for a powerful but short-range nuclear force to come into play. Instead of being repelled, protons are pulled together in a powerful nuclear grip. One proton flings off its positive charge and turns into a neutron (and also sheds a ghostlike particle called a neutrino; more about this later), so that soon the core of the aborning star is abuzz with proton-neutron pairs. Two proton-neutron pairs are welded together by the nuclear force into a helium nucleus, with four nuclear particles. The bottom line: Four hydrogen nuclei are fused into a single nucleus of helium. And here’s the wonderful thing. The helium nucleus weighs about 1 percent less than the total weight of the four particles out of which it was made. Mass has disappeared from the universe! Stuff has vanished. In its place: pure energy.

A star is born. The pressure of newly released energy pushes out from the core, resisting the crush of gravity. The contraction stops with gravity and fusion in exquisite balance. The star regulates its own burning like the thermostat on your furnace. If gravity gets the upper hand, the temperature at the core rises, releasing more energy to push outward. If fusion gets the upper hand, the star expands, diminishing the squeeze of gravity and lowering the temperature at the core. Every second at the center of a Sun-like star, 660 million tons of hydrogen are converted into 655 million tons of helium by the process known as thermonuclear fusion. The missing 5 million tons of mass is turned into an amount of energy equal to the missing mass times the speed of light squared. The rate of conversion is prodigious, but the amount of hydrogen in a star is virtually inexhaustible. A star like the Sun can fuse hydrogen for 10 billion years—until it has a core of helium and death begins. The riddle of the stars is answered. The light of the stars is nuclear energy, the same light that Marie Curie observed in her darkened laboratory on "the evening of the glowworms."

The gassy nebula that gave birth to the Pleiades was gathered by gravity into hundreds of stars. Some of those stars, the hot blue giants, are many times more massive than the Sun; to resist the greater crush of gravity, these stars must fuse hydrogen at a rate that will exhaust their core fuel in only tens of millions of years. The smallest stars in the cluster, the red dwarfs, are less massive than the Sun and need barely fuse hydrogen at all to hold up their own weight; these stars will live for 100 billion years. The hottest, brightest stars in the Pleiades will die explosively sometime within the next millions of years. (None have died yet, or we would surely have observed the shatters.) The coolest stars will live virtually forever. Meanwhile, the Pleiades will drift apart. The cluster will disperse. The longer-lived stars of the cluster will take their inconspicuous places among the trillion denizens of our galaxy. Our own Sun may have once been part of a newborn cluster like the Pleiades. If so, it has long since left the nest and abandoned its sibling stars.

The energy produced by fusion at the center of the Sun requires several million years to make its way up through the half-million miles of overlying gas, absorbed and reemitted many times along the way. At the surface it is released as heat and light, which zips across the 93 million miles of space between Sun and Earth in eight minutes. By the time the energy reaches Earth, all evidence of its source has been erased. But there is a way we can look directly into the center of the Sun, and see what is happening there almost as it happens. The key lies in the insubstantial neutrino (which, as you’ll recall, is released as two protons fuse and one turns into a neutron.) Neutrinos are strange little particles. They are about as close to being nothing as something can be and still be something. They have no charge and possibly no mass. However, they carry energy, and they zip along at the speed of light. Because they are wisps of almost nothingness, they interact with ordinary matter hardly at all. Most of the neutrinos created at the center of the Sun fly straight up through the Sun’s overlying layers. Within seconds of their birth they are launched into space, and eight minutes later some of them collide with the Earth. Go outside and face the Sun (don’t look at it directly!). Feel the heat on your skin. Sense the light on your closed eyelids. The heat and light were created at the Sun’s core millions of years ago. But as you stand there in the sunlight, trillions of neutrinos fly through your body every second, neutrinos created at the center of the Sun only eight minutes earlier. You are utterly transparent to these tenuous particles; they stream through you unimpeded. For that matter, the planet Earth is transparent; at night the solar neutrinos fall upon the other side of the planet, whisk right through the body of the Earth, and penetrate your body from underneath the bed! Can you believe this? Can you comprehend that every second of our lives we are blown through with a wind of neutrinos from the Sun? What was that line of Marianne Moore’s? "The power of the visible is the invisible."

Neutrinos are hard to catch, but not impossible. At several places on Earth—in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Italy—vast underground chambers of pure water have been set up to catch neutrinos. Every now and then a neutrino hits a proton or neutron in a water molecule and is absorbed, releasing a tiny flash of light. The pitch-dark chambers are watched with thousands of sensitive electronic eyes, and the flashes of faint light are recorded by computers. As strange as it seems, these underground chambers are telescopes that look into the heart of the Sun, seeing within minutes what is happening there. So far, the number of neutrinos snagged by the detectors is less than what theoretical astronomers have predicted. No one knows why. Perhaps some part of our theory of what is happening at the center of the Sun is wrong, or perhaps we don’t yet fully understand the nature of neutrinos and how they interact with matter. The scientists are busy; the answer will come. Meanwhile, they know that their neutrino telescopes are working. In 1987, a star blew up in the southern sky, a supernova, the first relatively nearby supernova in centuries. Briefly it blazed with a glorious light. At the same time that the supernova’s light reached Earth, the first large neutrino detectors (in a cavern under Lake Erie and in Japan) sparked with flashes of light. Across tens of thousands of light-years, these elusive particles carried the signature of a dying star.

The atomic nucleus was intensely studied by physicists during the early part of the twentieth century. They knew they were chasing the answer to the biggest question in science: Why is the universe filled with light? By the spring of 1939, the nuclear fusion reaction that makes stars shine had been identified by Hans Bethe, Carl von Weizsächer, Charles Critchfield and others. It was also recognized that when the nuclei of certain atoms of uranium and plutonium fission, neutrons are emitted that can collide with other uranium and plutonium nuclei and cause them to split. Under the proper circumstances, a chain reaction appeared to be possible—a vast amount of energy suddenly released from a small amount of matter.

American physicists asked Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt describing recent fission studies of Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. "It is conceivable," Einstein wrote, "that extremely powerful bombs of this type may be constructed." Roosevelt reacted decisively. The Manhattan Project was initiated to produce sufficient quantities of uranium and plutonium to make a nuclear weapon. At dawn on the morning of July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the terrestrial nuclear age was born. Marie Curie’s pale glow was turned into a blaze of light like one thousand Suns. A seething mushroom cloud rose heavenward from the desert floor. Within months, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated and a global war ended.

A chain-reaction fission bomb—the type of bomb that destroyed the two Japanese cities, will explode spontaneously if a so-called critical mass is assembled. You will recall that it takes extremely high temperatures (such as those at the centers of stars) to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium, because of the mutual repulsion of protons. Fission bombs can provide Sun-like temperatures here on Earth. It wasn’t long before physicists used a fission bomb to fuse hydrogen. On November 1, 1952, a hydrogen fusion bomb was exploded at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean; this bomb was many times more powerful than the weapons that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The power of the stars was brought down to Earth.

The mushroom clouds of those terrible explosions overarched the twentieth century, casting a shadow over exciting intellectual developments of the first half of the century and nearly scaring us to death during the second half. The latter gloom was somewhat ameliorated by the promise of peaceable uses of nuclear energy. ("The Atom: Our Obedient Servant" was the title of one magazine article in the 1950s.) But the bright promise of harnessing the atomic nucleus to provide cheap, inexhaustible energy mostly evaporated with the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And the collapse of the Soviet Union diminished the likelihood of global thermonuclear war. Many nations still have the capacity to cause nuclear devastation, but all in all nuclear physics is not so much on our minds as we begin a new century.

The nuclear age left a frightening legacy. Dozens of those young women who painted radium salts onto the dials of clocks, tipping their brushes with their tongues, suffered cancers of the mouth and jaw. Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning. And the planet is poisoned by radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants and the making of bombs. On the upside, we now understand what makes the stars shine and why life on Earth is possible. "Let there be light," says the Bible. It is a nuclear light. Wonderful and terrible.

FROM;  http://www.aspsky.org/mercury/ezine/zine30_02/zine30_02.html

OTHER LINKS ABOUT THE CONSTELLATIONS ON THIS SITE

DREAMS OF THE GREAT EARTHCHANGES - CONSTELLATIONS
... ALSO SEE: http://www.greatdreams.com/chems.htm ... Constellations and their Stars; Constellation Web Page; Cosmic Images of Ron Kohl; Crimean Astronomy Page ( USSR ...
www.greatdreams.com/constellations/constellations.htm

SIRIUS - THE DOG STAR - THE LOST AND MISSING STAR
... Nile, the Egyptians appear to have regarded LIBRA as the first of the zodiacal constellations. ... NOTE: See this page: http://www.greatdreams.com/dogstar.htm. ...
www.greatdreams.com/dogstar.htm

THE DELPHI ORACLE
... ORION AND THE CONSTELLATIONS. ... Orion is the key to the winter constellations, because you can find most of the rest of them using reference points on Orion. ...
www.greatdreams.com/delphi_oracle.htm

THE ALL SEEING EYE - THE CROP CIRCLE CONNECTION TO CREATOR AND THE ...
... that are still receding in expanding space, hundreds of millions of exploding atomic furnaces which are seen from this earth as stars, constellations, and a ...
www.greatdreams.com/eye/eye.htm

MY FATHER COMES TO VISIT - A DREAM AND PROPHECY- 5-30-99
... (10): The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give it's light. ...
www.greatdreams.com/father.htm

THE THREE PHASES OF THE SUN (SON)
... Winds" correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, a belt of the celestial sphere- about 17degrees in breath containing the twelve constellations which the ...
www.greatdreams.com/solar/phases.htm

Nostradamus...
... midst of all this, I read a book called, "The Book of Knowledge:The Keys of Enoch." Part of the book speaks of the meaning of certain constellations of stars ...
www.greatdreams.com/nostra2.htm