Are We Stars?

Have you ever wanted to become a celebrity? A star? To have millions of followers on every social media account? You probably have. You all are paying to get your accounts verified just to feel like Taylor Swift or Cristiano Ronaldo. However, actually, only 0.0086% of the world's population is famous (for your information, being famous doesn't include being a star among the peers in your batch).

Have you ever thought about why you could not be a star? What made you a normal citizen? It's because stardom costs dozens of things, from your time and effort to real character traits, likes, and dislikes.

If stardom is this hard to achieve, have you ever wondered how hard it is to be a real star? To glow in the night sky? To my astonishment, celebrities and stars have most things in common.

Did you know that stars are born, spend a lifetime shining, and then finish their lifespan and die? Even the death of stars is a spectacular light show. They outshine the whole Galaxy, which is made up of 100,000 million stars. Celebrities create similar waves too, like when the whole Wikipedia was struck by the shockwaves created by Michael Jackson's death in 2009.

Why talk about death first? Let's start from the birth. Out there in space, huge clouds of dust and gas exist. Their own gravity starts to bring the particles together, forming a core that gets hotter and denser. When the particles come close enough, the heat and density encourage fusion reactions, and the stars switch on, starting to shine. Stars and celebrities are always under pressure. They must shine all the time. People notice even the slightest changes, maybe that's why Justin Bieber sang 'my house was always made of glass'. Thus, stars are compelled to stay strong and bright despite the forces that try to collapse them.

Stars are constantly under two opposing forces. The star's gravity tries to collapse it inward, while the fusion reaction balances it outward. But when the hydrogen runs out for the fusion reaction, AWW GRAVITY WINS. However, the core doesn't give up. It starts fusing helium into heavier elements like carbon and oxygen, producing an overload of energy in a short period. The show looks like a helium flash with high-frequency rays.

Massive energy in a short duration causes the outer layer of stars to expand so much that they swallow the closer, inward planets. This happens in both stars, right? Thus, the star becomes red, and they are called red giants. Red giants shed their outer layers and become planetary nebulae, the most beautiful objects in the universe.

The dead remnant core remains and becomes a white dwarf, which has no nuclear fusion but is extremely hot inside. Our sun, which is the size of 1.3 million Earths, contracts to the size of Earth during the white dwarf period. Even though the white dwarf is dead, it keeps shining from its residual energy. Over time, they cool down and become black dwarfs. However, there are no black dwarfs in our universe as the oldest white dwarf is still hot enough to shine white.

But some stars, which are massive from birth (like the Kardashians), die with a bang and explode into supernova explosions. The explosion creates sonic waves of 330 dB, but fortunately, sound waves don't travel through space.

Celebrities are called stars for some reasons, it seems. They have to constantly struggle between forces, shine all the time, no matter what, swallow others' shine when they outshine, create shockwaves even in death, and most importantly, their core must be active all the time. Stardom isn't something easy.

Remember, everything we see around ourselves was made inside a star billions of years ago, before the sun and the planets were formed. Maybe that's why we believe our beloved people become stars when they die, because stars are where we came from...