Free Republic

These questions have been with us since our earliest forays into thinking about the sky, the stars and the wandering planets. The atomists of ancient Greece were convinced that the Universe was infinite and must therefore have an infinity of infinite worlds. In 1277 Bishop Tempier of Paris claimed that God could have created other worlds. Many scholars were unconvinced and argued that even if He could, He would choose not too. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for various heresies and it is likely that his advocacy of a plurality of inhabited worlds did not win...

Among the most poignant sights in the heavens are white dwarfs. Although they have a mass comparable to our sun’s, they are among the dimmest of all stars and becoming ever dimmer; they do not follow the usual pattern relating stellar mass to brightness. Astronomers think white dwarfs must not be stars so much as the corpses of stars. Each white dwarf was once much like our sun and shone with the same brilliance. But then it began to run out of fuel and entered its stormy death throes, swelling to 100 times its previous size and brightening 10,000-fold, before...