The Significance of Stars in the Universe and Their Impact on Human Culture Throughout Evolution

1. Introduction

Stars, those seemingly twinkling distant luminaries in the night sky, have been the very source of man’s curiosity and awe, playing a pivotal role in different aspects of human life, from culture and mythology to religion and navigation. Stars are capable of attracting attention not just because of their unusual luminosity as compared to planets and asteroids. The soundness of stars, the thought process of determining the rightness of their positions, and the philosophy of celestial body movements and life patterns can reveal the deepest nature and systems of mankind’s evolution. On one side, man’s curiosity has motivated and inspired many eminent sages throughout history to decipher the mystery. The attempt to unveil, confirm, verify, study, and even manipulate the nature of stars and their functions, for many, has transcended beyond the realm of science and exploration, leading to deep contemplations, intuitions, and realizations about the true nature of existence and consciousness.

Stars have also influenced and inspired great human accomplishments in art and literature. They were the source of parables to explain the most intricate topics of human consciousness and existence among great poets and the East Asian sages. Great strides were accomplished in architecture, creating some of the great ancient wonders, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza, in such harmony with the stars and in agreement with prophecies.

Triangles, squares, circles, and other geometric shapes with arcs, angles, divisions, and their combinations were generated to depict the beauty of nature and the bewilderment of how stars have spun time and space, cultivating the most glorious musical scales harmonizing frequency and resonance with the very foundation of matter and the action of stars. Stars have shaped different identities and lifestyles assimilating with the motion, position, and rhythm of their interferences. Without Missing a Moment has captured the essence of eternal conception, portraying the stillness of stars as a form of reflection and counterpart to the flow of time and space, suggesting a method of transcendence.

2. The Formation and Life Cycle of Stars

In the vastness of space, stars are born, live, and die, their formation and life cycle following a series of well-defined stages dictated by the laws of physics. The process begins with a nebula, a cloud of gas and dust in space that becomes disturbed and begins to collapse under its own gravity. As the material falls inward, it forms a protostar, a dense ball of hot gas at the center of the cloud. The protostar continues to grow as material falls onto it, becoming hotter and denser until nuclear fusion begins in its core, marking the birth of a new star. (Kwok & Kwok2021)

Once nuclear fusion begins, the star enters the main sequence phase of its life, where it will remain for the majority of its existence. In this stable phase, the energy produced by fusion in the core balances the gravitational collapse of the star, maintaining its size and temperature. The length of time a star spends on the main sequence depends on its mass, with more massive stars burning their fuel faster and having shorter lifetimes than smaller stars. The Sun has been on the main sequence for about 4.6 billion years and is expected to remain there for another 5 billion years. (Retallack et al., 2021)

Once a star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core, it can no longer sustain the outward pressure of fusion, and the core begins to collapse. The collapse increases the temperature and pressure in the core until hydrogen fusion begins in a shell surrounding the core, causing the outer envelope of the star to expand and cool. The shell hydrogen burning leads to a dramatic increase in luminosity, and the star becomes a red giant or a supergiant, depending on its mass. As the core contracts, temperatures and pressures rise until helium fusion begins in the core, leading to the formation of a new energy generation shell and a temporary halt to the collapse. After the helium in the core is exhausted, the evolution of a star becomes more complex. (Bécoulet, 2023)

2.1. Nebulae and Star Birth

Nebulae: The Cradle of Stars

It takes about 100 million years for a star to form, and many are in the process of being born as you read this. The birthplace of stars is a nebula, a large cloud of gas and dust. Most of the matter in a nebula is hydrogen. In some places, nebulae are very hot, about 100,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and they glow because of the high temperatures. Other nebulae are very cold; some are hundreds of degrees below zero. Cold nebulae do not glow, but they can be seen with radio telescopes, which detect the molecules in the gas that indicate they are not glowing. (David et al.2021)

Stars begin to form in cold, dark, near-invisible nebulae. Most of the time, the gas in a nebula sits quietly. The whole nebula acts like a one-ton block of ice, with only a few atoms moving around. Sometimes a nearby star explodes in a supernova; the shock wave disrupts the quiet gas, causing some of it to suddenly contract under its own gravity. The falling gas speeds up and heats up. The center of this contracting region of the gas can reach temperatures of millions of degrees. At this point, it is a protostar – the first stage in the birth of a star. (Connors, 2024)

While the protostar is forming, it develops a spinning disk of gas and dust around it, just like a top that is spinning; this accretion disk perfectly conserves angular momentum. Gas falling in from the disk heats up as it moves to the center, adding to the heat in the star. Most of the material in a nebula’s gas and dust becomes part of the star, but some material stays behind in the disk. Dust in the disk sticks together, forming larger and larger objects. These objects continue to collide and grow, forming the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets that orbit the new star. This process of star and planet formation is happening all over the universe, every second of every minute no matter how far away. (Alves et al.2020)(Bennett et al., 2022)

2.2. Main Sequence Stars

Main sequence stars arise from the contraction of interstellar clouds of gas and dust. As such, a nebula contracts, clumps form in its center as the gas and dust spiral inward, forming proto-stars. Counteracting gravity, any rotation of the proto-star forces some material outward—continuing the series of clumping and contraction—forming an accretion disk that powers high-velocity jets of plasma from the polar regions of the proto-star. A proto-star cools as it contracts. Eventually, the pressure and temperature become great enough in its core to ignite fusion of hydrogen to helium, marking the beginning of a course of stable evolution as a main sequence star. Over the course of several million years, the outflow of energy increases and the accretion of material from the disk gas continues until a state of equilibrium is attained wherein the fusion of hydrogen to helium generates energy output equal to the energy lost by the visible surface and corona. At this stage, the star is “on the main sequence.” (Tacconi et al.2020)

As a star progresses along the main sequence, it continues to convert hydrogen to helium products—about 1 solar mass every billion years in candidate stars like our Sun. After about 10 billion years of evolution in this stable state, the supply of hydrogen in the core is largely depleted, and the star begins a new and very different course of evolution. Around 90% of the stars that have ever formed in the universe are currently or will ultimately be found on the main sequence during their lifetimes—a testimony to the robustness of this mode of stellar energy generation.

The life cycle of a main sequence star is very dependent on its mass. More massive stars have greater pressure and temperature in their cores, thus burn hydrogen in a far more vigorous fashion. These stars have a higher luminosity and a hotter surface temperature, attributes that are used to distinguish main sequence stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Broadly, B and A type stars among the OBAFGKM sequence burn hydrogen faster than the Sun and have lifetimes of only 10-100 million years. Metastable F and G type stars, including the Sun, have lifetimes of millions to billions of years. Lower mass K and M type stars burn hydrogen more slowly and have the longest lifetimes of many billion years to over a trillion years. Because the current age of the universe is fewer than 14 billion years, no O, B, or A stars formed since the time of the Big Bang exist today. In contrast, no M stars born since the formation of the universe will have died yet. (Weinberg, 2022)

2.3. Stellar Evolution and Death

Stars endure a multi-faceted progression as they transmute hydrogen into heavier elements through nuclear fusion processes. These nucleosynthesis procedures, which metamorphose helium into heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen, occur in the cores of stars, with activation and deactivation rates governed by principles of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. The initial stages of shell hydrogen burning are triggered at temperatures exceeding 10 million degrees Kelvin, when protons can collide and coalesce to become deuterium nuclei that do not disintegrate. Conversely, as core temperatures lower to the critical threshold of helium ignition, further reactions inevitably halt.

A star's evolutionary fate is integrally tied to its mass. Characteristically, bright stars exist at the energetic high end of the range, embarking on tumultuous lives incorporating intricate nucleosynthesis sequences and culminating in core collapse and violent supernova explosions. Conversely, stars residing at the cooler, darker end of the spectrum are of low mass, exhibiting quieter yet equally intriguing pathways through life, death, and new beginnings. Spectroscopic analysis of nearby white dwarf stars has facilitated the determination of the most massive star, at 56 solar masses. (Vink, 2022)(Krause et al.2020)

Meanwhile, stars within 0.5 to 5 solar masses develop into red giants upon exhausting core hydrogen. Cores shrink and heat up, igniting hydrogen burning in revolving shells. Stars swell up and shroud in gas envelopes, which may elucidate distant carbon stars. Once core temperatures peak at 100 million degrees K, three helium nuclei coalesce to produce carbon explosions, ejecting outer envelopes as planetary nebulae and forming expanding gas clouds rich in carbon and nitrogen. These primordial materials may assemble into new stellar systems over millions of years. Old remnants of the core are white dwarfs, dim yet fervent at 100 thousand degrees K due to residual heat. Over billions of years, they cool down and crystallize, becoming invisibly far in the infrared and radiating nothing but gravity.

3. Historical Perspectives on Stars in Human Culture

The stars, in their myriad forms, have long served as inspiration and source for a plethora of human endeavors like religion, mythology, and the arts. Aureate spots twinkling merrily in the dark, starry sky of a cloudless night are an intrinsic part of one’s human experience. From the vast expanse of the ocean to the arid desert, it has served the same purpose of orientation for humans braving the elements with nothing but sailboats or camels. A child on the edge of the Pacific Ocean can witness the sea turtles plodding onward on a moonless night to the very waves that gently lapped at her cradle. In fact, in step with a night of jubilation and merriment, the patterns formed by these twinkling giants have inspired music, songs, and poetry throughout the ages. Emblazoned on the foreheads of some young couples is a constellation named “Hercules,” which marks the spot where sweethearts wend their way to eternal bliss in union, in direct contrast to the descent into despair marked by the pride of “Orion.” Such is the fortune of a people basking in its glow nightly. (Marchant, 2021)

The perception of twinkling lights above the ever-changing conditions of the Earth below belies a tormented past replete with superstitions, omens, and prophecies. Those very spotlights illuminating the path of a sailboat across the waters of the Mediterranean bled a thousand souls with treachery among the stars. Mariners of yore felt the bitter sting of betrayal while gliding ever so gently along beneath a gentle breeze at the mercy of the ever-shifting and unpredictable stars. The fiercest of storms would choose to descend out of the starry void at the least expected moment, propelling the salt-beaten corpses of lost souls thousands of leagues across vengeful waves. Lost out in the sea or desert, braving the cold harbors of night with the seething sun diametrically opposite, one could only beseech the questions beckoning through tormenting visions. The path chosen — did it provoke the wrath of the skies? Are the stars blind to drowning mortals ever missing a twinkle? Or has the vault above conspired with halos of fire descending from the skies to illuminate horrors across the lands below? (Radcliffe2021)

Yet beyond storms and tempests, conspiracies and judgments minted from pious vindictiveness and obscured by ignorance and inability to comprehend a world so vast at the mercy of unseen forces, stars remain. They shimmer passionately through the despair of a world replete with beauty and pain, illuminating the wish for tranquility forgotten in the sublime chaos of existence and the unquenchable thirst to understand the universe beyond the horizon of the bleakest of deserts. The very same patterns of horror and beauty have played out for ages in a coalescing universe. Burgeoning from the burning heart of giants to smolder across the vault and sow despair or idealism, such are the ages-old relics of an evolving universe! In the fortunate convergence of ability, a chance meeting across the sands of time — the scrap of parchment and gold gleaned from the towers of ivory — written along the tyrannies of memory comes creation, illumination by darkness. (Uskokovic, 2023)(Fane & Harris, 2020)

3.1. Ancient Civilizations and Astronomical Observations

Stars, as eternal and dominant phenomena in the night sky, have always intrigued humans. Ancient civilizations across the globe fervently studied their patterns and movements, leading to a vast catalog of astronomical knowledge. Mesopotamia, India, China, and Egypt stand as the four major cradles of astronomy. Each civilization conceived a distinct set of constellations based on their perspective and geographical location. Chinese astronomy developed the most systematic star catalogs among all the early civilizations, encompassing comprehensive records of celestial phenomena like lunar and solar eclipses, comets, and novae. Remarkably, some of these reports, such as a solar eclipse dated to 1136 B.C. and a supernova in 1054, were accurate for the given time frame. The indigenous people of Egypt, even before the pyramids were erected, associated constellations with the life-giving Nile River and conceived the goddess Nuit to embody the celestial dome. Stellar mythologies persist in art, architecture, and texts, still visible in modern times. Despite the passing of millennia, today’s Egyptian sky has remained nearly unchanged. The Mayan civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas meticulously recorded the cycles of planets, particularly the changes in the position of the bright planet Venus, which influenced both social and religious systems of the tribe. Australia is home to several indigenous clans that possess complex star knowledge tied to the Great Emu in the Sky. Avenues of the Emu follow the same route as the Milky Way, which changes with the seasons and oversees the reproductive cycle of the Emu birds on Earth. Hence, rich traditions of interpretation of constellations resonated from ancient peoples until today’s Indian Ocean observers. Dozens of star folklore depicting great ocean-story canoes ruled sea navigation for millennia prior to the modern compass. Full stories of stars decipher how ocean swells, winds, and weather pivot across the horizon. (Cheng)(Vavilova et al.2020)

With the advancement of civilization, various inventions arose of increasing complexity: writing, agriculture, numeracy, technology, cities, politics, and empires. However, humanity’s echoing questions—where do we come from, where are we going, and what are we—as well as the longing for orientation, constancy, and meaning would interlace through the ages. Unlike the natural phenomena of sunset and sunrise, such as birds, bees, seasons, and tides, the stars repeat their movements every 23.93 years with noteworthy precision. On cloudy, lunar nights, however, the planets, Sun, and Moon remain alone: mortal entities whose fount or dread kick starts the night, on whose arrival planetary symmetries compete against some numbers among stars. Ultimately, just as there is a uniqueness factor for each galaxy bubble, there must be some unique parameters analytic to planets and Earth to have Mercury rise daily over the ocean, there to collide dusk into dawn vestiges globally at intervals of fixed years, becoming night-starring, morning-vanishing porpoises, pythons, and emeralds, plus Venus, as evening, morning, and lunar on top. Such were potential questions made, star tales woven, and planetary myths vied by every pre-modern tribe, each within its own rhythms but all returning to the stars.

3.2. Role of Stars in Mythology and Religion

The stars, venerated in antiquity as celestial orbs, absolute in immutability and omnipresent in the night sky, overshadowed by numerous heavenly concerns, gave rise to a plethora of mythological interpretations in ancient cultures, feeding their hopes, fears, and feelings of insignificance. The same object illuminated by a bathing figure, an untouchable picture, and an interlocutor preserving the rights of the sacred are seen in various mythic interpretations from Egypt to Mesopotamia, China to India, Maya to Inca, Greece to Rome, and their transformation during the triumph of Christianity. Each tale is recounted as a unique mythological construct, endowing the stars with life, destiny, fate, protection, and providence. Herein, several schools in creation epics and mythologies around the stars are outlined, detailing ten prominent interpretations including: (Falkner, 2020)

(i) The Great Bear as a goddess in Sumer, Babylon, India, Persia, and the classical world with a dedicated temple, (ii) Orion adored as a sky god or cult hero, (iii) the seven sages of Sumer and Babylon symbolizing the Big Dipper, (iv) the shaman-turned-goddess representing the Milky Way in Siberian and Algonquin tales, (v) the twin brothers Castor and Pollux mythically impersonating Castor and its partner star, (vi) stellar hermaphrodites in Babylonia and Egypt, (vii) the celestial chthonic as the Sun in the Babylonian creation epic, (viii) a king cursed by the moon sacrificed in the morning on a star altar, (ix) a man initiated and liberated by Venus destroying a celestial monster in Aztec myths, (x) Enkidu sacrificing the bull of heaven to become the biggest star on the August full moon.

Timeless, these tales outlived the demise of cosmologies, imperial fall, and star observatories. Remnants echo today in song, dance, and agricultural lore in rural communities, immemorial rites immortalized by chance outcomes, rebellious myths about dwarfs and titans, or devoured celestial brothers by feeble eagles. Swallowed by cunning foxes or crocodiles, celestial seas emptied in vengeance and skies bereft of celestial quarrels, eternal myths alike the constellations forever frozen far from the tellurian world. Such hope-bearing odysseys encapsulated in enchanted signs of wonder equal to paradise await their fearless explorers embarking across tempestuous seas. Each poetic metaphor transcribing awe into song was harkened and memorized for ages till today. On Earth, pooled light, masculine serenity beyond change echoes in dreams, soothing afflictions of riotous cities. Adored supernatural omnipotent, eternal fierce and buoyant, escaped from mortal fates of sin and oblivion are ever-fertile objects of contemplation. (Greaves, 2023)

4. Scientific Discoveries and Technological Advancements

Beginning with the ancient Greeks, strong interest in celestial phenomena has led to important discoveries about the nature of stars. Stars were the first term for things beyond human comprehension, providing orientation in time and space. In this respect, stars, and particularly the Sun, are phenomena of existential significance. They greatly affect the existence of life on Earth, and their presence affects the way life developed, as well as architecture, agriculture, science, and philosophy. Calculations of dates and seasons originated in observance of stars. For nomads, stars were orientation markers; for settlers, they marked seasons and helped in sowing or planting. As a result, man tried to comprehend stars, realizing their periodicity and regularity. Growing models of the universe have included geocentrism, heliocentrism, and the modern one, in which the Sun is only a common star in the galaxy. The quest to understand stars, their properties, ages, brightness, movements, and beginnings, led to the development of representative science. Up to the twentieth century, all discoveries were made visually, with the aid of telescopes. However, from the very beginning, attempts were made to observe the stars with other wavelengths, such as radio, X-ray, or infrared. As the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs most wavelengths, great and expensive astronomical observatories were built in space, assisting in the discovery and understanding of exoplanets, black holes, the code of creation, time’s arrow, dark matter, and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Stars can spontaneously "destroy" their own creation and cause great destruction on Earth, like a supernova explosion. However, most of them remain stable on a constant path. Observations of visual paths of nearby stars have increased the comprehension of their movements, leading to the discovery of their galactic rotation and acceleration toward the center of the galaxy. Approximately two-thirds of bright stars are binary or multiple visual systems in which components move around each other. Their orbits can be adjusted using laws of motion, providing knowledge of stellar masses. Spectroscopic observations of binary stars have led to the understanding of systematic redshifts caused by relative movements with respect to an observer. In this way, the law was discovered, with galaxies receding in all directions on average, with an increase in distance, leading to the conclusion about large-scale expansion or "fleeing" of the universe. Observations of light curves or adaptive systems of binary eclipsing stars have revealed the need for a new method in understanding their shape and distortion, leading to a better understanding of the stellar structure. So far, more than 200,000 catalogs of variable stars have been established. Simultaneously with this new understanding and knowledge of stellar movements, the construction of mathematical models for interpretation and comprehension of observational data began. (Chulkov & Malkov2022)(Kerr et al.2021)

4.1. Telescopes and Observational Astronomy

For millennia, the stars have been a source of amazement and reverence for numerous human cultures. All around the globe, people have turned their gaze upward to the twinkling lights of the night sky. Early in human history, stars were among those celestial objects within direct perceivable reach, making them prime candidates for attempts to understand the heavens. Yet, while the stars appear like points of light in the night sky, they are immense spheres of incandescent plasma and are among the building blocks of galaxies and the universe at large. Many, along with the broader systems of planets, asteroids, carbon-rich dust, and gas swirling around them, have even been the birthplace of life, providing the ideal conditions for the delicate and complex interactions of elements taking place across eons of evolution. Today, observatories still frequent the same pristine mountaintops and dark deserts where many of the ancient peoples roamed. Advancement in technology ultimately granted humanity the ability to explore and ponder the riches of the cosmos. (Mendillo, 2022)

When first invented in the 1600s, telescopes transformed astronomy from a purely philosophical discipline to an experimental science. With a mere 21 cm aperture, Galileo’s telescope was able to reveal man’s first views of the stars, at the time fully present only to the gods. As with the majority of images produced in that decade, the pioneer observers were not artists but passion-driven astronomers who were moved to depict what they observed. Now, as all terrestrial mountains have been thoroughly explored with nearly every imaginable medium, the awe-inspiring photographs of nature’s vaults—from mountain peaks barren of life high above the clouds to coasts of green and gold sprawling far over the horizon—are often lost in thoughts of brightly lit streetlights or encased in contemporary soundproof devices. Following the first steps of Galileo, a few aeronautic amateurs also made crude atmospheric observations soon after, approximating stars’ distances via geometric triangulation. With the advent of aviation and spacecraft, scientists had access to the heights of thousands of miles above sea level, unreachable to ancient sages, where astronomical observations captured through naked eyes remained limited by the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere. On the morning of July 24, all planets aligned to unfurl the banners of a laboratory orbiting a quarter million miles away from that blue oasis, above the smog made by greed and war, an orb entirely devoid of any land of tranquility.

4.2. Stellar Classification and Properties

The universe is a vast repository of intriguing celestial objects beyond Earth, among which stars are the most prevalent. Stars are made up of gas and dust and differ in several aspects, such as size, color, energy output, temperature, and stage of life. However, despite encompassing innumerable stars, the universe remains a pertinent enigma to astronomers. Scientific methods have been developed to study stars and classify them into various categories according to individual properties, which in turn provides insights regarding their characteristics and stage of life. (Ventura et al.2020)

By carefully monitoring starlight over a period of time, astronomers can determine properties about each star, such as its temperature, mass, age, and radius. The first achievement using such techniques was accomplished with a study of a group of stars in 1943. All these stars have been found to have similar properties in some regard, but differ from each other in mass and hence have different rates of internal nuclear processes. A plot of temperature versus absolute brightness for these stars produces a grouping along a well-defined curve. This curve is known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, or H-R diagram in short.

The H-R diagram now serves as a base of stellar classification and depicts a star's evolutionary history. Almost all stars are born on the lower right-hand side of this diagram where the vast majority of them remain as protostars and spend about ten million years accreting mass from the interstellar medium and heating up internally until they reach a stage of nuclear ignition. Some of them are capable of burning hydrogen in their core, while others cannot. Stars like the Sun begin to burn hydrogen in an almost all-spherical state and eventually move onto the red side of the diagram. Stars such as Betelgeuse are just the opposite; they begin to burn hydrogen while in an elongated, rotating state and drift off the H-R diagram completely after burning all of their hydrogen reserves. Examination of stellar migration through the H-R diagram has proved that stellar clusters do contain stars of similar formation history and chemical composition.

5. Modern Cultural Representations of Stars

In contemporary society, as advancements in technology provide more sophisticated understandings of stars, the role of stars in media and popular culture has transformed. While stargazing and the philosophy of stars retain their allure, the exploding field of astrobiology and the possibilities of exoplanet habitation have introduced a fresh exploration into the universe. Begun by genres such as classical science fiction, the exploration of travel to other planets now also includes exoplanets beyond the solar system, which challenges our understanding of habitable worlds and alien life. Within this more scientific realm of popular culture, stars continue to symbolize the fantastical—the seemingly impossible journeys through space, even if they are now grounded in the science of astrobiology. (Milestone & Meyer, 2020)

Aside from this more scientific exploration of stars in popular culture, stars are also philosophically engaged, seeking to make sense of life through perspectives from both Darwinian evolution and astronomy. Whereas early star-based philosophical inquiries often wondered about the meaning of life on Earth, modern philosophical reflections consider how meaning is affected when placed in the context of the vastness and eternity of the universe. If the continuance of life on Earth suddenly comes at odds with humanity’s impulse of conquering the stars, the philosophical concerns stare straight at the absurdity of life.

Popular representations of philosophical perspectives pose prominent thinkers such as Socrates, Descartes, Pascal, Hume, and Zeno in conversation with modern thinkers such as Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, Freud, Deleuze, and Lacan. While their musings are earnest attempts to tackle some of life’s greatest mysteries, it is the humor of anxieties that jestingly captures the absurdity of humanity’s footing. Within contemporary literature, the difficulty of making sense of life and the misalignment of instincts as vertical thinking comes unsurprisingly from the pen of a philosopher with a Darwinian specialty. Even with a Darwinian perspective from natural anthropology, fascination with the stars still abounds in the literature of overlooked old astronomers and essayists delighted in witnessing every new comet till their deaths.

Stars are portrayed as wondrous, beautiful, yet feared. This portrayal, surprisingly prevalent in contemporary Hollywood film, resonates strongly with humanity’s earlier relationship with the stars. Beginning civilization with their very first collective works of myth, religion, and philosophy, humanity gazed at the dark, empty, beautiful night and wondered about life’s creatures, nature’s laws, and the righteous gods given mortality. From such wonderings, astrobiology embraced the philosophical yet fantastical nature of humanity’s fixation with the stars, depicting expectedly wondrous and beautiful places, burgeoning histories, and feared hostile creatures.

5.1. Literature and Art

For much of history, humans looked up to the stars for safety and comfort, and they have looked across the stars with yearning to learn about the very universes they inhabit. Stars have given rise to many stories, to be both seen and told. From the first tentative scratches of early humanity on the cave wall to the extremely high-tech apparatuses of today, human art has strived to depict the stars, strived to understand what the stars bring, and to bring sense to the unimaginable. More than any other aspect of the surrounding natural world, stars have been a source of much speculation in myth, faith, and philosophy. (Matloff & Bangs, 2020)

In the oldest written literature that has survived to this day, a Babylonian story describing the creation of the universe, the makers of the heavenly bodies were nameless deities, born of chaos—fresh water and salt water. Stars appear grouped: the 'great star' or 'star of suckling,' which later was localized as the Great Bear, was born without a mother and formed star groupings: 'the deities which made the sanctuaries,' 'the deities which made the yearly feast,' fixed calendar dates. The names of people were quoted as well. The Deluge took place during the constellation Taurus. Then the hearts of the deities inspired pity and love, and the heaven was raised. The seventh tablet narrates how one deity fascinated another by the astral calculations.

The earliest representation of a constellation shape was a perspective view of an arc of stars, including the Pleiades. Similarly strange was hearing the song of these stars, which was seen to decrease at night because of the quickly turning navels of deities. The oldest star catalogs belong to the same time—as old as writing. Annually returning stars were considered as deities who bring or withhold calamities. They were invoked for success in hunting. The stars that fought with one another were, however, depicted as evil ruminating demons who devoured children and had to be warded off, which probably reflects the life-threatening drought climate. Lunar eclipses happened annually in autumn when, mythologically, a patron of sheep was devoured. Solar eclipses occurred on the longest days. It was a damp climax of the year when all deities, even the primeval chaos mix, were pictured to be naked. When picturing ethnocentrically the local patron and during ethnocentric wars, many people became aware of the thoughts of their own and the destiny of their battle, and of the fate of the spaces in between.

In the West, Hellenistic astronomy finally overcame the ignorance about the invisible faith and changed the thoughts on the stars to a naturalistically understood perspective rather than mythological deities. However, on Mars, where gods were considered as good deities, this viewpoint never became prevailing. In both mythology and natural science, there is a hidden truth. It is just that nobody knows when these aspects overshoot one another in getting blinded to the others' realms. (Graham2021)

5.2. Film and Popular Culture

Stars remain an inspiration and fascination beyond literature and the arts. Their explorations and representations have continued in modernity by filmmakers and pop culture. On the one hand, film art, as a visual art, represents and interprets stars with various visual forms and artistic languages. On the other hand, popular culture, or mass culture, usually refers to something that is loved by the majority of the people in a certain social class, including story, character, music, picture, game, or fashion. The stars traveled in contemporary times, in terms of both scientific and non-scientific knowledge, and were well accepted by lay audiences. This popularization process further inspired and encouraged their explorations in other fields of popular culture.

Throughout the 20th century, filmmaking technology gradually developed from the silent film era to the sound film era, to Technicolor films, and later to talkies, 3D, IMAX, and matinee. In this developmental and evolutionary process, stars were also ceaselessly explored and represented in moving pictures, similar to other visual art forms, yet with particular developments. The scientific knowledge of stars traveled into moving pictures via a documentary, bringing with it factual representations and strong visual impacts. In popular education and entertainment films, mostly fiction and narrative films, stars are represented with textual knowledge often inspired by the concept of personification, including anthropomorphized representation, godly representation, extraterrestrial representation, and emotional connection representation. The construction of gazes upon stars brings a variety of interpretations and perceptions. In an endeavor to decode diverse representations of stars and stimulate thoughts about anthropocentrism, universality, and humanity beyond the Earth, this study attempts to focus on distinct approaches to stars in different cultures.

By the middle of the 20th century, stars had become one of the themes of adventure stories, vernacular myth, and popular scientific knowledge in mass culture. They were curiously and deeply explored, yet with a difference in style and approach. The development of scientific knowledge about stars, Earth-Moon relations, and how celestial bodies moved inspired wonder tales, experimental fiction, satire, cosmological epics, and other new forms of storytelling in cinematic cultural activities. Attempting to affect viewers’ perspectives, popular representations of stars in ranting synchronized projection, plunge cutting time, cyclone fade-in, unrealistic movement, fish-eye photography of galactic infernos, and other surrealistic and bizarre modes of vision encouraged viewers to think about the existence of human beings in the universe. (Kempshall, 2022)(Andrew & Green, 2021)

6. Conclusion and Future Perspectives

Stars, their light and power have been an inspiration, a mystery, a guide-post, and a point of worship in human culture throughout ages. Humans have looked up into the night sky since time immemorial and marveled at the brilliance of stars. As dwellers of the Caucasus Mountains wrote many poems on dazzling stars which glimmer throughout the summer nights warming the heart and lifting the spirit. Early civilizations envisioned star groups forming mythical creatures and celestial stories were orally transmitted from generation to generation. Philosophers and scientists unravelled distant stars’ intricate behaviors and replaced anthropocentric views with heliocentric or even galactic-centric cosmologies. Since the invention of the telescope, human evolution has been dazzled by the beauty of celestial nebulas, planetary nebulae, and the delicate shapes of galaxies. Likewise, far distant point-like sources raised fundamental questions regarding the universe. Are stars unique cosmic structures or there are more like them? It has been revealed that giant galaxies of stars can exist containing more than a trillion solar masses of stars. Are stars solitary structures or there are more like them? It has been discovered that in giant dark matter halos groups of stars can form and orbit around the center of the halo, as companion galaxies do around big bright galaxies. There are numerous other discoveries and pieces of knowledge regarding the birth of stars, which can occur in clouds of cold gas and dust, and their evolution, where small stars live persistently for billions of years, while massive stars explode after several millions of years. This however does not mean that the human curiosity has been satisfied. Discoveries raise even more questions. For instance, how can it happen that systems of several hundred thousand stars do not fall apart due to its tightly bound chaotic structure formation, but on the contrary grow in time reaching a population of hundred million stars? Human knowledge of stars, their light, and power endures unbroken continuation throughout its written and unwritten history. By collecting knowledge about entity or phenomena illuminating the night sky, the earthly living, scientific, philosophical, and artistic culture has been empowered and universe exploration’s new horizons have been opened.

References:

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