Should you make a wish when a star falls from the sky? Interesting facts from an astronomer

Researcher and astronomer Laura Nicole Driessen explained whether it is worth making a wish when a star falls from the sky. After all, it is known that when you see a shooting star, it is already dead. So will your wishes come true?

However, according to Laura Driessen in ScienceAlert, the stars we can see in the night sky are much closer and live much longer than we realize. And it is very unlikely that you will accidentally make a wish on a star that has already died.

The stars are closer than you think

The argument that the stars we make wishes on are already dead is that they are millions of light years away. This means that the light from the star has traveled millions of years to reach your eyes, so by now, the star is millions of years older and probably most likely dead. But in reality, it is not.

All the stars we can see with our eyes are in our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, and our solar system is about 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy.

So, if we could see stars at the very far edge of the galaxy, they would still only be about 74,000 light years away. That's far from a million light years away, let alone millions.

Visible stars are even closer

In practice, the stars we can see are not that far away. On a night, with no moon and good eyesight, the faintest star we can see without a telescope has a brightness of about 6.5 magnitudes. Brighter stars have a lower magnitude, and dimmer stars have a higher magnitude. The brightest star in the Southern Cross has a magnitude of 0.8, and the faintest star in the Southern Cross has a magnitude of 3.6.

The limit of visible brightness of 6.5 magnitudes means that we can only see stars about 10,000 light years away from Earth. So, if you make a wish on one of the most distant stars, the light will travel 10,000 years before it reaches your eye. And if we assume that wishes travel at the speed of light, it will take another 10,000 years to reach the star. So, even the most distant visible star becomes only 20,000 years older when your wish reaches it. So the question is: do stars live longer than 20,000 years?

Stars live longer than you think

The Yale University Catalog of Bright Stars contains 9096 stars whose brightness exceeds 7th magnitude, which is about the limit of what our eyes can see. Many (40%) of the stars in the catalog are so-called giant stars, which come in three varieties: normal giants, bright giants, and supergiants. The more massive the star, the shorter its life. But in astronomy, a favorable time is at least a few hundred thousand years. Much longer than it takes your wish to get to a star closer than 10,000 light years away.

The rest of the visible stars are what are called main-sequence stars (or intermediate-aged stars) and subgiant stars. They exist much longer, up to several billion years. So, when it comes to wishing, age is just a (very large) number.

The best stars to make wishes to

If you still feel a little nervous about making a wish upon a dead star, there are some safe options:

Alpha Centauri is the closest to Earth and the fourth brightest star in the sky. Even better, it's actually three stars, and they're only about four light years away. They will definitely last longer than the eight years it takes for their light to reach you and for your wish to reach them.

The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is a main sequence star that is only 8.6 light years away. Epsilon Eridanus is about ten light years away. It is similar to our Sun and is just under a billion years old. Since Sirius and Epsilon Eridanus are in middle age, they have millions, maybe billions of years left to burn.

The safest star to send wishes to? The sun! The Sun is only eight light minutes away, and it will be a main sequence star for about 5 billion years.

So, when you make a wish, this star is less than 10,000 light years away and will probably live for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and maybe millions or even billions of years.

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