All the stars are closer

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor

We owe a great deal of our modern knowledge about stars to a group of late-nineteenth-century computers. You may be thinking that the use of multiple computers that long ago would be impossible, since the first computer wasn’t built until 1941. But these nineteenth-century computers weren’t made of chips and wires; they were a group of young women tasked with recording and analyzing astronomical data at Harvard College Observatory.

Women were hired as computers for their attention to detail but also because they could be paid about half the salary of their male colleagues at the observatory. The observatory’s human computers worked six days a week, pouring over images of stars and entering data into astronomical tables. Their boss, astronomer and observatory director Henry Pickering, insisted that women were better suited to this line of work than the more theoretical or observational work conducted by male astronomers. With very little chance for advancement at the observatory, the computers were simply meant to record and catalog the data; however, many of these women made amazing discoveries. Some, like Williamina Fleming, discovered new stars and nebulae. Annie Jump Cannon created a system for categorizing stars that we still use today. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin determined the chemical composition of stars, and Henrietta Leavitt determined the distance to variable stars, which led to the discovery of other galaxies and the theory of our expanding Universe. These women advanced our understanding of stars, and in doing so, became scientific stars in their own right.

These women “computers” are one link in a chain of astronomers, from ancient stargazers to modern scientists, that runs through the history of human societies. Just as they have taught us about the Universe’s past, studying them can teach us about our own development as a species.

Graphic Biography: Intuition and Evidence: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. By WHP, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Observing the night sky

Early humans, both Homo sapiens and other hominid species, gazed at the stars, often creating groupings and patterns of star clusters. Our ancestors also weaved tales about the constellations and the origins of the world and humanity. Remarkable similarities exist in these stories and myths, as humans, separated by thousands of miles of land and sea, stared up at the sky to examine a vast sea of stars. For example, Australian Aboriginal societies believed that a hunter (Nyeeruna/Orion) chased the seven sisters that made up the Pleiades cluster, which is the same interpretation that the ancient Greeks gave to these constellations. In Indigenous American cultures, the Pleiades were brothers or dancers. And to ancient Hindus, they were the wives of the seven rishis.[1] But even for our ancient ancestors, the stars held much more information than stories of hunters chasing sisters.

From Orion’s Belt, extend your gaze to his bow and follow it past Taurus to the Pleiades. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. Public domain.

While today we rely on our phones and mapping technology to give us directions, the stars allowed early humans to travel in specific directions, illuminating the paths to better foraging regions as the seasons changed, or helping Indigenous Americans determine planting seasons. Knowledge of the stars was also essential for mariners such as early Polynesians, who passed down navigation techniques orally and committed vast amounts of information to memory in order to safely sail thousands of miles across the Pacific. Merchants in the Indian Ocean used star charts and the astrolabe to determine their position at sea, and shared information and innovations in navigation across societies as they traded along networks of exchange. While the stars were used for many practical purposes such as agriculture and navigation, they also became representative of more abstract concepts for both people living in the past and for our own modern societies.

Portrait of Ahmad Ibn Mājid. By BHP, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Stars as symbols

In addition to illuminating our night sky, stars have become symbolic of subjects as diverse as liberty and national heritage to faith and the cult of celebrity. Numerous societies, many separated by thousands of years and miles, incorporated stars into their religious symbols. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna and the Egyptian goddess Ishtar were both associated with eight-pointed stars. These stars were later incorporated into Islamic art and found their way into Christian churches after the Crusades. For Islamic and Jewish mystics, the six-pointed star was thought to hold magical powers. In seventeenth-century Prague, this star of Jewish mystics was adopted as the Jewish community’s official symbol. Early Christians used the five-pointed star to represent both the five wounds of Christ and the star of Bethlehem, while also often using it to symbolize Christ. Given the importance of stars to various faiths, it’s not surprising that some rulers and nobles also wished to establish a connection to stars, incorporating them into imperial and aristocratic symbols such as on coins and in heraldry. But stars weren’t simply confined to imperial symbols. The Mongols, rulers of the largest land-based empire in the world, brought together scientists and astronomers to help predict the future and in the process advanced scientific knowledge across their vast empire.

Tara Masjid, the Star Mosque, built in the early nineteenth century, Dhaka, Bangladesh. © Majority World/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Perhaps the most recognizable uses of star imagery today are those on national flags. Stars feature on about one-third of all modern nations’ flags. For many nations, stars represent liberty while for others, the inclusion of a star refers to the dominant faith practiced in the region, such as the star and crescent on the flag of Algeria or Israel’s Star of David. For many Southern Hemisphere nations’ flags, the inclusion of stars references the Crux constellation that features the Southern Cross—stars that provided navigational guidance to Australian Aboriginal, Māori, and other Polynesian travelers as well as later European explorers.

Like our early ancestors, we continue to use stars as imagery and in countless metaphors. We speak of having “stars in our eyes” or we “count our lucky stars.” Artists write songs about the stars—the title of this blog is a nod to one of these songs—and we call actors “movie stars.” We give hotels star ratings and use gold stars on children’s homework. We will likely always be fascinated by stars and continue to write poems, songs, movies, and histories about them. As for the power of stars in the future, we’re currently trying to harness stars to generate power through nuclear fission and, perhaps soon, through nuclear fusion, as well, which will help us in our quest to roll back some of the impacts of climate change.

Want to test your knowledge of stars and see how your students interpret the famous Carl Sagan quote that we are all “made of star-stuff”? Check out our starstruck lesson plan.

[1] Simon J. Cropper, “The Meaning in Our Stars,” Pursuit, University of Melbourne, 2019. Timothy L. Hubbard, “The Inner Meaning of Outer Space: Human Nature and the Celestial rRalm,” Avances en Psicologia Latinoamericana 26, no. 1 (Jan/June 2008).

About the author: Bridgette Byrd O’Connor holds a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford and has taught the Big History Project and World History Project courses and AP US government and politics for the past 10 years at the high-school level. She currently writes articles and activities for WHP and BHP. In addition, she has been a freelance writer and editor for the Crash Course World History and US History curricula.