When Stars are Born
Summer 2010
" One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
Friedrich Nietzsche
You may have noticed that I like to use pictures from the cosmos - and that I like to change them!
The one I have included above is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a star cluster - an area where new stars are forming - named NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is a close neighbor to our Milky Way, at "only" about 200,000 light years away!
I chose this image because June marked nine months since I registered the Center for the Development of the Person as an LLC.
As one friend pointed out, June for me was "birthing time" - since nine months after conception is when humans are ready to leave the womb and begin to survive as individuals separate from the mother, it seems only appropriate to think in these terms for any kind of project.
For stars to be created in the universe, it obviously takes a whole different quantity of "time", but I have always loved the analogy that Antonio Mercurio found years ago between the creation of stars and the birth of individual human beings as "Persons - capable of freely and responsibly loving themselves, loving others and receiving love" (as well as the process that occurs within a group of Existential Personalistic Anthropology).
Stars form when a great cloud of unorganized matter begins to condense and heat up until it finally collapses, eventually reaching a point where the hydrogen atoms begin to fuse and the thermonuclear process begins. Radiation, heat and light are emitted - and we have a new star!
