Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

us hotter summers than we like; and they’ve made weather control

increasingly complex, sometimes even um-nanageable.

“Nevertheless, we-the astrophysicists and other scientists, I mean-were

interested in finding out the why of the changes. At first it was very

difficult to unearth any clues. The Sun seemed much the same as ever,

consisting mostly of hydrogen, with circulating traces of magnesium,

oxygen, aluminum, silicon, phosphorous, sulfur, chlorine, argon and

potassium-all, of course, in highly ionized states, and in traces only,

since most of these elements are at the core of the star, invisible to our

spectroscopes. (Forgive me the catalogue; I assure you Ws necessary for

proper understanding of what follows.)

“Nor did the solar constant at first provide us with any clues. The very

slight increase corresponded to

And all the Stars a Stage 53

no infra-stellar process that we could account for. As for the other

findings, I’ll summarize by saying that they were all quite consistent with

a star of our Sun~s age and mass.

“It was only when we applied the increase in thd solar constant to the core

of the Sun that we found what was happening.

“In brief, the heart of our Sun has now become sufficiently dense so that

the temperature there has passed 2,000 million degrees, in a hell of

stripped and mangled nuclei and intense gamma radiation such as no finite

mind could hope to imagine. At this temperature, the familiar metallic

trace elements are beginning to undergo fushion. We have already picked up

the first faint shadow of a titanium line. Soon we shall be seeing