A colorful orb decorates the region surrounding the bright triple star Rho Ophiuchus. Probably no other region provides such an impressive spectacle of colorful glowing gases juxtaposed with converging dark rivers of thick dust.
The area is highlighted by the bright star Antares, a red supergiant 40,000 times more luminous than our sun. The star is immense. With a diameter of 800 million kilometers it is so large that it is one of the few stars with a measurable disk. If placed at the sun its edge would stretch almost to the planet Jupiter.
Antares lies embedded in an unusual circumstellar yellow cloud formed by the ionization of the fierce stellar winds blown by the dying star. Antares has a B type companion star only 3 arcseconds away which orbits the larger star every 900 years.
When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another. The terror of eye contact! Sherry Turkle, in her recent book “Reclaiming Conversation,” has written about the loss of self that this avoidance creates and also of the peculiar boredom paradoxically produced by the act of constantly fleeing boredom.