My Stars!

Let's hear it for the Babylonians, who either invented or discovered astrology, depending, a long time ago. The Babylonians worked it all out just before being obliterated by Cyrus the Great--bummer they didn't see that coming!

But there's something to the idea that mere antiquity gives a philosophy weight. After all, rumors still persist that even before the invention of the written word, the primordial Wakka Wakka people were well on the way to proposing a Grand Unified Theory of particle physics, when unfortunately their oral tradition was disrupted by the terrible Tongue-Eater tribe bent on expanding their woolly-rhinoceros hunting territory. Such a loss.

Astrology, however, continued to thrive long after the Babylonians failed to, because it is fun. You get your own chart. It's your chart! Not really like anyone else's! You feel like a five-year-old with her first backpack that has her very own initials on it. It's very specific, and just as good at explaining your life as anything else. You can open a can with a car tire, too.

An acquaintance practices the occult arts for a living. Shortly after we met, she asked me my zodiac sign and I made her guess. She finally fetched up at "Libra" eight signs in. "You know how I knew?" she said, triumphant.

She has since explained various aspects of my personality to me, although I rarely recognize any of them as being my traits, and when I squinch up my eyes and say "Well, not really, I'm just the opposite," she tells me that it's because probably my moon is somewhere or other. Else. In a house. There are a bunch of houses. That moon could be anywhere. You can't trust it.

The idea is that the position of the planets (and moon and sun) at the very moment of your birth determines a lot about who you are and what you may become. Your whole natal chart is thrown out of whack if you're off by a couple hours.

Doesn't he look thrilled.

My mother was clearly aware of all this, which is why she had me induced one week before the school cut-off and two weeks before my due date, so that I would grow up to be the kind of kid likely to enter first grade at age five instead of age six and ultimately leave home altogether as soon as possible, because she and Daddy were getting on in years.

Astrology worked well enough to be considered a science for a long time, but there were always things that didn't quite add up, until, finally, the missing piece showed up in 1930, when Pluto came on board and straightened out the whole franchise. Unfortunately, he later retired as a planet, and now just does consulting part-time.

I'm not certain what mechanism the planets use to influence our psyches. Evidently it has to do with energy, which will remain undefined out of respect for its mystery. All the planets have different kinds of energy. I don't know which one holds the most sway over me. But the smart money is on a gas giant.

Let's Hang On To What We Got

They've found over a thousand planets outside our solar system by now. It's hard to spot an extra-solar planet all by itself. You not only need a good telescope, you need a giant hand to hold in front of its star to block out the glare. So mostly this is not how they're found. One of the ways you can find planets in other solar systems is to measure just how fast the star is trying to get away from us; and if it's dragging planets with it, you'll see a wobble in its progress. It's impossible to get up to speed towing the kids. Another way to discover new planets is to examine the brightness of the stars they're revolving around. If the planet travels in front of the star in relation to us, the star should dim a little. In order to do this, you have to be looking at the star just when its planet is traveling across its face, or you won't notice it. Space being the roomy place it is, the odds of a planet lining up between us and its star are pretty low, but it happens, and there are people--night shift workers, mostly--who spend all their time looking for it. As long as it doesn't happen when they're in the bathroom, they'll catch it.

So we do know that there are planets out there in other solar systems, and sometimes we even know what they're made of. They've recently located one made of rock and iron, just like Earth. Earth is mostly molten but crusts up nicely on the chilly outer edges. This new planet is whipping around its star in eight and a half hours and is not considered a likely spot for life. It would be hard for a critter to hang onto a planet flying around that fast, but inasmuch as the planet is entirely molten, holding on is the least of the challenges.

They've even found planets orbiting around pulsars. A pulsar is what's left over when a star blows up, and all that's left is the throbbing. I wouldn't have imagined that any planets would survive their star going supernova, but they do. This should be a great comfort to the kind of people who are so insufficiently frantic about their own mortality that they need to worry about the sun blowing up. I've met them. They tend not to get worked up about climate change, for some reason.

Scientists like to find planets they think might support life. Unfortunately, with the state of scientific literacy being what it is, this encourages people to imagine we might hop onto those planets once we're done trashing this one. If you point out how many light-years away they are, they just think it sounds sunnier.

Of course, we needed to properly define what a planet is before we could assert we had found any, and recently we've come to a consensus. A planet must be big enough that its own gravity has spanked it into a round shape. But it must not be so massive that it begins its own thermonuclear reactions. If that happens (it would have to be thirteen times bigger than Jupiter), it is essentially a star, if not a major one. It would be called a brown dwarf, or, as they prefer to be known, a Little Star Person Of Color. But there's a third requirement for achieving planet status, and this is the one that doomed Pluto: it needs to have mopped up most of the stuff around it. It turns out that Pluto is a member of a whole roaming pack. Not only that, but some of the other members of the pack are nearly as big and vicious. Pluto's in the Kuiper Belt, a revolving swath of space crap including a few other spheres that could qualify as planets themselves if we weren't enforcing that clean-up clause, but we must have standards.

My favorite of the planets discovered so far is the one they're calling the Fluffy Planet, with a density like that of cork. Even if it doesn't have enough mass and gravitational pull to hold onto anything, we could always pin stuff to it.