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THROWBACK THURSDAYS–BLACK HOLE TAMER

I’ve had these drawings for a Power Point slide background sitting around from freshman in undergrad and figured might as well post them. I haven’t done a Throwback Thursday since I got followers so here we go.

This was from a time where I had yet to realize that the black holes’ mouths would be purely space-time, and so I drew them with actual physical teeth and tongues here. I also drew blood coming from the star who got tidally torn apart for some reason.

You can also see the earlier designs for Stella, Cobalt, and Rhodie here. Stella was originally a much darker yellow,  before I copped out on the whole “the Sun is actually white” thing and made her a yellowish-white. Cobalt also had granulation, as I had yet to learn that massive stars’ photospheres were radiative. Stella also is shown to blush rosy pink, when I have since realized it would be much funnier if she just got giant sunspots on her cheeks when she was aroused. (I need to get the rosy cheeks off of Rhodie in the character page someday…)

Basically the premise of this was that there is a star who is trying to be like the lion tamer who puts his head in the big cat’s mouth, except said star will do this with a black hole. The text was in the Power Point presentation, but I can give you a synopsis:

 Tamer Star: Fellow stars, starlings, and starlets! Today is a great day in galactic HISTORY! You will see for the first time in the Universe, gravity defied! I will tame this savage dark beast! 

Cobalt’s thoughts: “This better be good. Cobalt’s only got a few hundred thousand years left.”

Tamer Star: I will stick my head into the maw of this black hole, and I shall return unscathed! It will be a triumph of light over the sinister darkness!

(Black hole wimpers, in pain from its hunger pangs)

Tamer star: All right, then! HERE I JUMP INTO THE UNKNOWN!

(Tamer Star sticks his face into the black hole.)

(Other stars watch in fixated horror as the Tamer Star gets tidally disrupted and his innards splatter everywhere)

After Tamer Star is completely eaten by the black hole:

Stella: “These black hole tamer acts are sorely predictable aren’t they?”

Cobalt: *retches* Cobalt’s just gonna go home and puke his outer layers off. 

Rhodie: “I dunno what’s bothering you guys so much.”

(of course she closed her eyes the whole time so what does she know?)

(The original text had Cobalt not referring to himself in the 3rd person, and saying at the end he felt like he was going to puke his core up into a supernova. Rhodie was bragging about how since she’s a red dwarf star, she’ll never have to deal with it.

I changed it slightly because I’ve since made Cobalt’s most characteristic trait his baby-like naiveté. He entered the main sequence too early, but unlike the other O-type stars, he never quite learned how to fake actually being tough and mature. Like a baby he has trouble distinguishing himself from the rest of the world, so he has some difficulty with first person words. 

More doodles that Tumblr wouldn't let me cram onto the first post. From top to bottom... 

-Stella practicing for a corona conformation show 

-The O-type police officer with his weaponized Dyson rings 

- Stella attempting to escape the O-type officer with her own Shkadov thruster, and failing because she has less acceleration 

-Mini San Andreas trying to look cute 

-Tartarus consuming a gas cloud 

-Tartarus with Schwarzschild again 

THE ORIGINS OF STELLA, AND THE GENDERING OF THE SUN

The celestial body characters as you know them today were first created when I was in middle school*. Most of them have changed appearance drastically since then. Tartarus used to have sunglasses, crystalline eyes, and spiked wristbands; the T-Tauri stars Astro and Astra were 4-pointed, with black eyes and no protoplanetary disk; and Chandra had arms, legs, and wings.

You can see my high school designs for some celestial body characters here. Man, these are so painful to look at nowadays. I still have no idea how I thought black holes could wear clothes. 

However, Stella has not changed appearance much, and that is because while Stella proper was created by me in 8th grade, I first drew her design much earlier, when I was in elementary school. Basically, Stella was the Sun.

While stars of course have no gender, I nonetheless have always personified the Sun as feminine. It is after all, our Mother Star, the force that birthed the planets and continues to nurture them with its life-giving light. The Sun has a slight pinkish tint to its white light, it goes through menstrual magnetic “cycles,” and it even has a ballerina skirt (seriously! look it up):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliospheric_current_sheet

Over the years though, I began to realize that the Sun was always personified as masculine in popular culture. I started to wonder why this was the case. My classmates told me it was simply because the Sun is much brighter and more dominant in the sky than the Moon...so it was inevitable partiarchal people would assume the Sun was male and the Moon was female. 

But this argument didn’t satisfy me. The Sun is so very different than the Moon; they’re not comparable objects at all. And while ancient peoples did not know about the nature of stars, it was surely clear to them the Sun was hot like fire and so bright it lit the entire sky up blue, whereas the Moon didn’t do anything like that.

As it happens, there have been several cultures that personified the Sun as female, and they were far from matriarchal. In Arabic, the Sun is feminine and the Moon is masculine. The Japanese have Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun. And it turns out the very English word Sun comes from Sunna, the Germanic sun goddess!

So...that brings us to the question at hand: if the English word Sun originates from a female mythological figure, why is it that it is almost always personified as male in English culture? I’m an astrophysics graduate student, not a cultural historian, but I suspect it has to do with the influence of Classical Mythology on the Western psyche. Helios, Sol Invictus, and Apollo were all dudes, and for most Westerners, Greek & Roman mythology is the only mythology they know. So our masculine solar entities are essentially our modern interpretation of the Greco-Roman sun gods. 

In any case, I went along with my female Sun, and created stories where she went on adventures throughout the galaxy. However, it became clear that there were some problems with this idea. If the Sun went off away from the planets and did its own thing, the solar system would be destroyed. If the Sun took the planets along, then Earth would be razed clean by all the blasts from magnetars and active black holes the Sun would have to fend off on her adventures. Furthermore, if the Sun were an intelligent being, it would be nice to negotiate with it, but unfortunately this will never happen. I mean, if I were the Sun, I’d have some sort of plan to hand my planets off to another star before I died. Making the Sun sentient would basically force it to be a jerkass. 

I eventually came to the conclusion the stories I wanted to tell would make more sense if they took place in a faraway galaxy billions of years ago, than if they took place in our own solar system and Milky Way where we can clearly see the stories are nonsense. And so, Stella was born.

Stella is the protagonist of the novel I am working on, and fleshing out her personality has been an intriguing challenge. Originally, she was little more than a sunny, bubbly foil to the dark and brooding SMBH Tartarus, but after I sat down with some stellar structure textbooks, she has come to be almost a dialogue about what it means to be a star in general. She means well, and has a warm, life-giving light, but she is also incredibly powerful, and sometimes she does not handle her strength well. She tries to put on a face of heavenly equilibrium, but it is clear she has no more power to change the Universe than a being far less powerful than a star, and it is a struggle to bury her feelings. Being billions of years old does little to erase the trauma of her past, but it ultimately helps her come to grips with her fears. 

And eventually...reveal who she truly is.

A BELATED HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM INSIDE THE EVENT HORIZON

Life doesn’t always go the way you want it to. Sometimes you get stuck doing the same thing over and over again, circling around your goal, never quite getting there. Time does not answer your calls for it to slow down, and sometimes there is nothing to catch you when you fall. 

But even from darkness there can be light.

So let us look forward to the future. It will be a long and lonely road ahead, but being able to experience the journey is what separates us from mere photons. 

The first panel depicts the primary core of the Antiochekan Federation. I imagine it to be a giant elliptical that has merged with several spiral galaxies. Kinda like Centaurus A, but with seven cores from all the other galaxies that haven’t quite been tidally stripped yet. 

And yes Tartarus did just light up a whole quasar inside Antiocheka for Stella. No, he didn’t rip her apart to do that! He’s too big for his tides to affect her anyway.

“Peribothron” is the word for closest approach (or periapse) of an orbit to a black hole. Well, it is one out of three words for that (the others are perinigricon and perimelasma) but it is by far the coolest sounding of the three. Plus it comes from the Greek bothros meaning pit, and ancient Greek is always cool. The other two terms just sound like a racial slur and a weird new skin disease respectively.

STELLA AND RHODIE...REALISTICALLY?

As I have mentioned before, I am currently writing a science fiction novel with the astronomical object characters, but done in a more realistic tone than the comics. Their descriptions in the text suggest something quite different than the wide-eyed, big-mouthed cartoony style I draw them in the comic as. 

This was my attempt at illustrating what Stella and Rhodie “really” look like. Their eyes are for the most part only distinguishable from sunspots in that they are less irregularly shaped and somewhat reflective when illuminated (I sort of imagine their eyes have both a reflective back layer like that of animals with eyeshine, as well as other layers that can reflect light from outside to protect their eyes from the glare of say, other stars they are looking at.) Their mouths are not literally an opening connecting to the inside of their body, but rather patches of their photosphere where they send modulated light signals to speak to other stars (hence why their mouths are unnoticeable here...they’re not speaking.)

The Life of a Star: 12 Billion years in 6 minutes