Caoimhín's Content

In the last piece, we took a look at some stars that were famous for moving quickly. The only one visible to the naked eye, 61 Cygni, is pointed out a the start of this video as well. Even though it has some unique features, it isn’t particularly well know. Some stars are incredibly famous, from very bright stars like Sirius, to very close ones like Alpha Centauri. It is those starrs that we’re going to look at, stars that are well known enough to feature in works of science fiction.

Despite being smaller, and fainter, Barnard’s star, which is also a fast moving star and also mentioned in the previous video, may be more famous. Being the fastest moving star we have found, or at least the star with the highest proper motion, helps generate interest for the star. Barnard’s Star is also the second closest star to the Earth. With so many interesting facts about it, interest spread from the scientific community, which led to it being mentioned in various works of fiction. It’s one of the first stars mentioned in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, being referred to as a sort of “hyperspace juncture”. It’s also serves a similar function in The Garden of Rama by Arthur C. Clark, and is mentioned as Barnard Prime in Star Trek. Being so close to us, it was also the target for exploration in Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson, and it pops up in TV shows such as Star Trek. Thanks to how unique this star is, it’s become quite well known despite being invisible to the naked eye.

Moving on to a star that is visible to the naked eye, we look to Epsilon Eridani or Eridanus, a star in the constellation Eridanus. It is another star that was featured in Star Trek, and has been posited as one of the stars that the planet Vulcan orbits. As the home world of Spock and all the Vulcans, it is a more important location in the series and is visible to the naked eye at the right time of year. Right now, it is the wrong time of year, but once we get back to winter time we should be in with a chance of seeing it. However, I’ve previously mentioned the star 40 Eridani as the home star of the planet Vulcan. I recently devoted a video to how we believed that there was a planet around this star, but eventually found that this was not the case. It does still seem to be the preferred home star of the Vulcans in the Star Trek cannon, but it is science fiction after all. You can look back and check out the relevant video if you’d like, but for stargazing Epsilon Eridani is an easier target.

None of those stars are as easy to spot as the truly bright ones. Sirius, as the brightest star in the sky pops up in various works of fiction, often inhabited by aliens called Sirians, in books such as the Lucky Starr books by Isaac Asimov. It may also be inhabited by dogs or dog like aliens, as in such TV shows such as Dogstar and the Canisians in Doctor Who. Being the Dog Star in the constellation of the Big Dog, Canis Major, it is often associated with canines. Betelgeuse is nearby, and also quite bright, but seems to pop up in fiction less often. It is the home of Ford Prefect in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and course there’s an association with the movie Beetlejuice there as well, especuilly as the name is spelt “Betelgeuse” on many occasions in the movie itself. These stars have been very well known for a very long time, so even in early works of science fiction these stars would often be mentioned because they’re so visible to the naked eye. They are interesting stars especially if you’re just looking with the naked eye because they are so easy to see, but some very famous stars are invisible to the naked eye.

A particularly famous star that’s featured in science fiction quite a lot, is Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is really the name of a group of stars, with Proxima Centauri really being Alpha Centauri C, the smaller third member of the star system. Proxima gets the most attention of the three as it is the closest star to the Earth, despite being invisible to the naked eye. Rigel Kentaurus is one name for the brightest star we see in the constellation of Centaurus the Centaur. It is really the two brighter components of the multiple star system, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. Centaurus or Kentaurus, here do mean the same thing, with one using the more Latinate C, while the other uses the more original Greek, or Hellenic, K. When it’s spelled with a K I tend to pronounce it with a K, as Kentaurus would suggest, but if there’s a C then I might pronounce it the other way, with a “soft-C” or S sound. We’re looking for Proxima Centauri, which is just a more informal name for Alpha Centauri C, but it helps for searching for it specifically, as it is the only smaller fainter member invisible from the Earth. Looking at tis distance, it’s 4.24 light years away, which is a pretty small distance for interstellar space. Given that this is the closest star to us and our solar system, it’s often considered the first target when people are leaving the Earth in science fiction. It has featured inn writings as far back as the 1930’s, and it’s even been featured in video games. In one version of Sid Meier’s Civilization, called Alpha Centauri, you get the chance to build your civilization on another world, orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars, rather than here on Earth. Various futuristic science fiction technologies need to be employed to ensure the survival of the human settlers. There are a few stars that have been mentioned in video games, up in Ursa Major there are few stars mentioned in the Mass Effect video game series, such as the planet Ursa Majroris 2, or Ursae Majoris 2, and the star 61 Ursae Majoris. Although various details are changed or exaggerated, as they are in most works of science fiction, these are still real stars, and that’s kind of the important thing. Real stars do get used in fiction, once they’re interesting enough, once people learn about them. Of course, it may not be their distance or motion or any other scientific factor that makes them interesting. Sometimes, all it takes is having cool name. Stars like Achernar for example or Antares even may feature just because their names are interesting and sound good. This of course is a primary concern, though maybe not the primary concern, for many authorsm and fantasy and sci-fi authors in particular,

Having cool names is an important thing for, so much so that sometimes real stars are renamed to make them sound a little bit cooler, to sound a little bit more sci-fi. For example Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky, the brightest in the constellation of Carina. Although it is very bright, it is mostly a Southern Hemisphere star, which can lead to it being slightly lesser known, simply because less people live in the Southern Hemisphere. A planet orbiting Canopus would probably be called Canopus a or a similar designation, but it’s most famous appearance in sci-fi calls it Arrakis, or Dune. Canopus is the star around which the focal planet of the Dune series by Frank Herbert, called Arrakis or Dune, was supposed to orbit, at least in the books, I don’t know if that’s referenced in the movies. Canopus is a very bright star, but we don’t get to see it in the Northern Hemisphere, for Ireland at least it never rises. This is true for a couple of the other stars that are in Dune as well, as it features several different systems, though it concentrates more on the planets. A few are in the Northern Hemisphere, but one of the other major locations is down in this region of space, Delta Pavonis. This star isn’t particularly bright, but it is near the Peacock Star in Pavonis, the constellation of the Peacock. Star name may not be familiar, but it is meant to be the location of the planet Caladan, the home planet of Paul Atreides and House Atreides. Both of these locations are ion a nice region of hte Southern Hemispheres sky, with the Magellanic clouds behind them in the background. The Large and Small Magellanic Cloud are dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, so they’re not actually in between the stars. We have Dune orbiting Canopus, which is 309.15±15 light years away, so we don’t know it very exactly, although a margin of error of 15 light years either way isn’t really that bad for a star around 309 light years away. Comparing that to Delta Pavonis with Caladan, this star is just 19.9±0.02 light years away, so we know this a lot more accurately, and it is quite close at around 20 light years away. Even though they look quite close together in the sky, they’re pretty far apart in 3D space. Really, even the distance in the sky is pretty far, before accounting for their actual positions relative to each other.

With Barnard’s Star as the second closest to us, and Alpha Centauri, especially Proxima Centauri, being the closest, it makes sense that they would appear often in fiction. You might expect that the third closest star would also pop up, and formerly it did. For a while, Wolf 359 was considered to be the third closest star to the Earth. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, just like Barnard’s Star, and is also known by the designation Gliese 406. Despite being a reasonably well studied star, it isn’t very well known and lacks a common name altogether. It isn’t a default part of the software I use, Stellarium, but it is in the SIMBAD database, that is SIMBAD with an M, and that has the necessary information for Stellarium to drop it into the sky. It was considered the third closest star to us, at just 7.8 light years away, Compared to Barnard’s Star as the second closest star to us at about 6 light years away and Proxima Centauri being about 4 and a bit, it is certainly quite close. This star has been featured in sci-fi, in Star Trek, as the location of a battle which was said to have happened close to Earth and indeed that’s about is one of the closest stars to the Earth, but not the third. The more recently discover brown dwarf pair, Luhman 16, is just 6.5 light years away. Being brown dwarfs, this binary pair are even harder to spot than red dwarfs would be, barely on the edge of being a star. Objects smaller than brown dwarfs are often referred to as failed stars, sub-brown dwarfs, and may in fact be very large rogue planets. An object like this, known as WISE J085510.83−071442.5, or WISE 0855−0714 for short, lies just 7.4 light years away from us. This at least makes Wolf 359 the fifth closest interstellar object, if not star.

This is a s close as you can get outside of our solar system, but of course the Sun is a star and of course that’s featured in lots of works of fiction. Sci-fi stories such as the movie Sunshine for example feature the Sun prominently, and even the earliest science fiction books may deal with it. In the book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, a sci-fi book sometimes described as a modern fairy tale and the basis for the movie The Iron Giant, feature a contest between the giant Iron Man and space Dragon, where in they both must endure high temperatures. The book is quite different form the movie, but still features a young boy named Hogarth befriending the giant robot. Indeed, the Sun is probably the most common star to be featured in fiction, being a lot more immediate to us and appearing inn various other types of fiction as well, not just science fiction. If you’re talking about other planets, particularly life on other planets, then you’re probably looking at science fiction, but the Sun can be a factor in any story set on Earth, even in non-fiction. There are a lot of stars in the sky and any star that has a name, or that you can see clearly with your eyes, has probably featured in fiction to some degree. The brightest star in Orion, Rigel, is supposedly the home of the Rigellians, aliens like Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons. Omicron Persei is certainly a real star system, but whether it has any planets is unknown, such as Omicron Persei 8 from Futurama. Stars that are not visible to the naked eye or difficult to see with the naked eye, like Alpha Centauri, or Barnard’s Star, are more likely to be featured in science fiction because there is something scientifically interesting about them. Once the scientific community has gotten interested in a star, that can bleed over into the science fiction community, and of course there’s a bit of overlap, some science fiction authors astronomers and scientists themselves.

This has been a bit of a whistle-stop tour through some of the stars that feature in science fiction. This just covers some of the famous and interesting ones that I’m aware of, there’s certainly loads loads more. If there is a particular sci-fi real star you like you can let me know, or come along to one of my live shows to ask me in person. I have one coming up in The Friary in Cork City on the 23rd of this month at about 7:30. If you can’t make it, you can still subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel for more pieces like this one, and I hope you will return next time for more.