Howdy Stargazers, and welcome to this episode
of Star Trails. My name is Drew, and I'll be
your guide to the night sky for the week of February
the 8th to the 14th. This week we continue our
exploration of the lives of stars, in particular
the ones alive right now that are shaping the
solar systems, nebula and even galaxies that
surround them. We'll talk about how they're born
and how they live their lives. Later in the show
we'll take a look at this week's sky and I'll
demystify the phenomenon of the so -called planetary
parade. One of those is forming right now, and
it could make for some interesting views. Whether
you're tuning in from the backyard or the balcony,
I'm glad you're here, so grab a comfortable spot
under the night sky and let's get started. When
we look up at the night sky, it's easy to think
of stars as static, fixed points of light that
simply exist unchanged night after night. But
stars are anything but passive. While they're
alive, right now, stars are shaping their surroundings,
organizing matter, and quietly steering the future
of the universe. They're not just objects in
space. They're active agents within it. Stars
also don't exist in isolation. That sense of
solitude is mostly an illusion created by distance.
Most stars are born inside enormous clouds of
cold gas and dust drifting through galaxies.
These clouds are often called stellar nurseries,
and while that name emphasizes beginnings, what
matters for tonight is what happens after stars
appear. Once stars form, they don't politely
step aside and let the nursery continue undisturbed.
They interfere. A stellar nursery becomes an
active construction site the moment stars turn
on. Young stars pour out radiation and stellar
winds. Their light heats nearby gas. Their pressure
pushes material away. Cavities open up inside
the cloud. Dense regions are eroded. and other
regions are compressed. In some places, star
formation is shut down entirely as gas is dispersed.
In others, new stars are triggered as material
is squeezed just enough to collapse. Stars don't
just come from their environments. They immediately
begin reshaping them. A nearby and famous example
of this process is the Orion Nebula. When you
look at Orion through a telescope, you're not
just seeing something ancient or finished. You're
seeing an ongoing process. Massive young stars
flood their surroundings with intense ultraviolet
light, sculpting glowing walls of gas and carving
dark lanes where dust blocks the light. Some
regions are being cleared out, while others are
actively forming new stars. Orion is not a snapshot
of the past, it's stellar influence unfolding
in real time. Another striking example is the
Eagle Nebula, home to the famous Pillars of Creation.
Those towering columns of gas are not quietly
building stars in isolation. They're being actively
eroded by radiation from nearby massive stars.
The pillars themselves are temporary structures,
slowly being destroyed by the very environment
that surrounds them. This is what stellar influence
looks like, creation and destruction unfolding
together over millions of years. Stars also rarely
form alone. Most are born in groups called star
clusters, and these clusters come in two very
different flavors. Open clusters are loose, relatively
young groups of stars that form together inside
stellar nurseries. Their gravity is weak, and
over time the stars drift apart, spreading into
the galaxy. These clusters let us watch stellar
evolution in its early and middle stages. A beautiful
example is the Pleiades, visible to the naked
eye as a small dipper -shaped group of stars.
It's a young cluster still interacting with leftover
dust from its birth cloud. Another is the Hyades,
an older, more spread out cluster that shows
what happens as gravity slowly loses its grip
and a stellar family dissolves. Open clusters
remind us that many of the stars we see, including
our own sun, likely began life with siblings
that are now scattered across the Milky Way.
Globular clusters, on the other hand, are something
else entirely. These are dense, ancient spheres
containing hundreds of thousands of stars, all
bound tightly by gravity. They formed early in
the galaxy's history and have remained intact
for billions of years. Inside them, stars are
packed so closely that stellar interactions are
common, and the environment is far more crowded
than anything near our sun. One of the finest
examples visible from the Northern Hemisphere
is the Hercules Cluster. Through binoculars or
a telescope, it appears as a dense glowing ball
of stars, an entire ancient stellar city suspended
in space. Globular clusters show us what happens
when stars live their lives together for immense
spans of time. They're reminders that stellar
evolution is often a communal process, not a
solitary one. Clusters also reveal something
fundamental about stars. When all stars in a
cluster form at the same time, the differences
we see between them are not about age, they're
about mass. Mass determines how a star behaves
while it's alive. Massive stars burn hot and
fast, with fusion running furiously in their
cores. They shine brilliantly but briefly, sometimes
for only a few million years. Smaller stars are
different. Red dwarfs, the smallest stars capable
of sustaining fusion, burn their fuel slowly
and efficiently. They mix their hydrogen throughout
their interiors, wasting very little, and as
a result, they endure. Based on how slowly red
dwarfs consume their fuel, astronomers calculate
lifespans not in billions of years, but in trillions.
Ten trillion years, and possibly more. The universe
itself is only about 13 .8 billion years old.
So how can we possibly know that some stars will
live for trillions of years when the universe
hasn't even been around that long? The answer
is that astronomy doesn't rely on weighting.
It relies on physics. We understand how stars
work at a fundamental level. How much fuel they
contain. How fast they burn it. and how efficiently
that energy is produced. Once you know those
things, you don't need to watch the entire lifespan
play out any more than you need to wait for a
candle to burn out to estimate how long it will
last. There's also an important piece of observational
evidence. Not a single red dwarf has ever been
observed to die of old age. We see young red
dwarfs, old ones, and ancient ones. but no red
dwarf remnants created through normal stellar
aging. The universe simply hasn't been around
long enough for that to happen. The absence isn't
a mystery, it's a confirmation. While stars are
alive, they're also busy building systems. When
a star forms, it's surrounded by a rotating disk
of gas and dust. Inside that disk, material collides
and sticks together, eventually forming planets.
Stars don't just host planets, they define the
architecture of entire solar systems. A star's
gravity sets orbital paths, its radiation shapes
atmospheres, and its early activity determines
which planets survive and which never fully form.
Stars also define where life might exist. A star's
brightness determines where liquid water could
persist on a planet's surface, but that zone
is not fixed. As stars age, they slowly brighten
and the habitable zone moves outward. Planets
drift into and out of favorable conditions, not
because they move, but because their star evolves.
Beyond planets, stars provide something even
more fundamental, persistent energy. Not just
light, but long -lasting energy gradients that
keep chemistry alive, atmospheres dynamic, and
complexity from running down too quickly. Stars
act as long -burning engines that hold complexity
open, locally and temporarily, but long enough
to matter. Zoom out even further and stars help
define the structure of entire galaxies. They
trace spiral arms, outline galactic discs, and
mark where gas collects and where it doesn't.
Galaxies don't look the way they do despite stars,
they look that way because of them. This leads
to a quiet realization beneath all this. We're
living in a very particular chapter of cosmic
history. Star formation is still active. Bright,
sun -like stars are common. Heavy elements are
abundant. Planetary systems are widespread. In
the far future, the universe will belong to small,
dim, long -lived stars, glowing faintly for trillions
of years while galaxies slowly fade. Right now
is a relatively bright chapter. Stars are still
alive in large numbers, still energetic, still
shaping their environments. In other words, they're
still doing their work. Stars are not static
points of light. They heat gas, sculpt nebula,
regulate star formation, build solar systems,
and define where complexity can exist. They don't
simply shine. They organize matter. patiently,
collectively, and over immense spans of time.
And all of that is happening right now. After
a quick break, we'll check in with what you can
see in the night sky this week. Stay with us.
Welcome back! This week the moon is moving through
its waning gibbous phase and will pass third
quarter on February the 9th. As the week goes
on, the moon rises later each night, which means
darker skies earlier in the evening. By midweek,
you'll have a more generous window for observing
before moonlight becomes an issue, especially
if you're heading out shortly after sunset. You
may hear this week described in headlines as
a so -called parade of planets and rather than
dismissing that outright it's actually a good
opportunity to explain what's really going on
and Why planets so often appear in the same part
of the sky? All of the major planets in our solar
system orbit the Sun in nearly the same flat
plane From Earth that plane projects onto the
sky as a gentle arc called the ecliptic. It's
the same path the sun appears to follow across
the sky over the course of a year, and it's also
where the moon and planets spend almost all of
their time. So when several planets are visible
at once, they aren't lining up by coincidence.
They're simply tracing the same shared highway
across the sky. This week, that highway runs
low across the western and southwestern sky after
sunset. Jupiter is the easiest place to start,
bright, steady, and well above the horizon as
twilight fades. Saturn sits much lower, closer
to the horizon, and requires a bit more patience
as it lingers in the glow of sunset. Mercury
makes only a brief appearance very low in the
west, rewarding observers who look early and
know where to scan. That's why planetary parades
tend to be quieter than the headlines suggest.
The planets aren't stacked in a dramatic row
and they won't leap out at you unless you already
understand the layout of the sky. What you're
really seeing is the ecliptic itself, the architecture
of the solar system made visible. If you step
outside and slowly trace that gentle line across
the sky from west towards south and then east,
you're following the same plane planets have
orbited in for billions of years. Once you recognize
it, you'll start seeing it everywhere, in where
planets rise, where the moon travels, and even
where eclipses become possible. Once twilight
fades, this week is a great time to explore some
quieter corners of the winter sky, objects that
don't always get top billing but reward a little
patience. In Gemini, look for the open cluster
Messier 35. It's a rich, wide cluster that works
beautifully in binoculars and small telescopes.
It has a loose, scattered character that feels
very different from tighter, more famous clusters.
Lower in the southern sky, in Pupus, you'll find
a trio of often overlooked open clusters, Messier
46, 47, and 93. These three make a nice study
in contrast. One dense and rich, another loose
and brighter, and one smaller and more compact.
They're excellent targets for small telescopes
once they've climbed clear the horizon. For a
globular cluster that tends to fly under the
radar, look just below Orion toward the constellation
Lepus from Messier 79. It appears as a tight
concentrated glow through modest telescopes and
offers a very different feel from the more famous
globulars that dominate summer skies. Observers
with darker skies may want to spend some time
in Monoceros, the faint constellation between
Orion and Gemini. Here you'll find NGC 2264,
sometimes called the Christmas Tree Cluster.
It's a subtle region combining a scattered group
of young stars with faint surrounding nebulosity.
This is not an object that jumps out immediately.
It rewards lingering, careful -looking, and wide
-field views. Before we go, I just wanted to
note a quick milestone. February 4th marked the
second anniversary of Star Trails. Last year,
I did a special episode to commemorate the show's
first anniversary. And in it, I talked about
how the show was produced and why I started it.
That was back in episode 50 on February the 2nd,
2025, if you're curious. I don't have anything
special planned for this anniversary. My goal
is to continue cranking out episodes and refining
our approach and just try to make each episode
better than the last. The crazy thing is there's
now nearly two years worth of astronomy content
in our back catalog. That has to count for something.
As always, if you have show ideas, topics, or
questions, feel free to connect over at the show
website. That's going to do it for this week.
If you found this episode interesting, please
share it with a friend who might enjoy it. The
easiest way to do that is by sending folks to
our website, StarTrails .Show. And, if you want
to support the show, use the link on the site
to buy me a coffee. That really helps. Be sure
to follow Star Trails on Blue Sky and YouTube.
Links are in the show notes. Until we meet again
beneath the stars, clear skies everyone.