Published in the September 14-27, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Three bright points of light have been hanging as a triangle in the south-southwest sky over South Valley all summer. Nearly every night for the past three months, the planets Mars and Saturn and the star Antares have been in a celestial dance set in the constellation of Scorpius. I have felt a deep sense of awe in watching this slowly-paced heavenly waltz.
Mars is the bright butter-scotch colored planet, the one every child with a love for astronomy knows has the deepest canyon and highest mountain in the solar system. When as a kid I first learned that my first name “Martin” meant “warrior of Mars,” I imagined myself an ominous soldier from the fourth rock from the Sun. Later, I realized that my name really referred to the Roman war-god Mars, and not literally the planet. But it didn’t matter much. It was about that time in 1976 that NASA’s two Viking landers came to rest on that other world and sent images back to Earth of a dry and desolate landscape. I then imagined myself not a warrior but a scientist exploring the Martian terrain.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the solar system. The gas giant is named after the Roman god of agriculture. That name is not quite as exciting as military conquest of Mars, but it’s size is definitely impressive — it boasts an average radius of nine times that of planet Earth. In college, I took an astronomy class where one night the class went to Grant Ranch County Park in the mountains east of San Jose and observed celestial objects through the instructor’s high-powered telescope. Peering through the eyepiece, I felt a sense of wonder looking at Saturn with its rings making it appear much like a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space.
The third object in the celestial triangle I have been observing lately is Antares, a supergiant 550 light-years distance from Earth. The light that now hits our eyes left that star several decades before Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage to the New World. Antares gets its name because its red color often confused ancient people with Mars. Ares is the name of the ancient Greek god of war and ant means “not” — so the name translates to “not Ares.” If Antares was at the center of our solar system, its outer diameter would extend to about where our asteroid belt now lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is a red giant, giving it its cardinal hue. Scientists think that Antares within the next few hundred thousand years will explode as a supernova. And when it does, if there are worlds around it, those planets and moons will be vaporized in the blast. And when 550 years later the light of that supernova reaches Earth, if there might be people still on our planet, for a few months they will see the Antares supernova as bright as a full Moon and brilliant even in the day hours.
There’s a special magic in looking up at the sky on a clear night and observing the wonder of the worlds that share our universe. The people of ancient days enjoyed a night sky free of the streetlights and other night-time illumination that our modern world finds a daily part of existence. We now need to find places far from city lights to gaze up at a sky and experience Milk Way hanging overhead like a stream of cloud. Gaze on it and ponder that you’re looking at possibly as many as 200 billions stars making up our home galaxy. Astronomers tell us that many of those stars might have orbiting them planets that are much like our own Earth.
It no longer seems unlikely to the science community that there might easily be other worlds with continents and oceans and an atmosphere where life might dwell. And who knows? Maybe some of those planets have given rise to intelligent life forms possessing an intensity of curiosity much like we humans have long had. They might point at a point of light in their own night sky, a star we know as our sun which makes life possible on our planet. And maybe they might wonder what worlds orbit that far-off star and if any of them have curious being that might be gazing at a triangle of stars and planets some summer night and wondering what other civilizations might exist somewhere out there.
