Are stars alive? This seems to be an old thread, but I've enjoyed reading it.
I've no PhD, I simply googled this question after reading the SF novel Astra Somnia (star dream). The author talks of a stellar society, where planets and comets are body parts to a heliospheric sentient being - like the Gaia Hypothesis but applied to the sun. Or to all stars, I suppose. And it made me wonder.
Are the majority of stars part of a couple, a binary system? I seem to find differing results. As a teacher, I wonder could anthropomorphising of the different stages of the lifecycle of a star lifecycle be a valid imaginative tangent that lends itself to astronomy instruction? It's not my field of speciality, but the framework seems to fit, and I wonder what the problem could be. It was a science fiction novel, after all, but nothing I've read here seems to contradict the possibilities the author raised. Has anyone else read this book, perhaps someone with a PhD? (I'm still working on mine...grin)
Perhaps those "many mansions of the heavens" refer to sentient energies throughout our cosmos; perhaps we are not only star dust, but stars dreaming.
