Lonely Stars, Lonely Planets

Lonely Stars, Lonely Planets

The stars are lonely. They may be surrounded by planets, but these worldlets are rocky and lifeless, they are planetary systems frozen at some early stage at their evolution. Perhaps, many stars have planetary systems rather like our own: at the periphery, great gaseous ringed planets and cold icy moons. And nearer to the center, small, warm, blue-white, cloud-covered worlds, surrounded by an infinite grey and violet silence.

On some of these lonely planets, intelligent life may have evolved, reworking the planetary surface in some massif engineering enterprise. These worlds, if they do exist, they are our brothers and sisters in the Cosmos.

The Milky Way contains some 400 billion stars of all sorts moving with a complex and orderly grace. And all of these brilliant and enormous bundles of fire are lonely, very lonely.

Loneliness versus solitude. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)