Meets Bigfoot Sampson

Stargaz­ing can be a lonely pre­oc­cu­pa­tion. Some­times it’s so hard to con­vince your loved ones to travel to the mid­dle of nowhere in the dark to see a bunch of sparkly things, as beau­ti­ful as they may be.

Most stargaz­ers have spent an evening or two alone in the mid­dle of some farmer’s field, lost in the vast­ness of space and, frankly, scared out of their minds. The sounds of the night are the scari­est part — the rus­tle of a corn stalk can be the sure sign that Big­foot is approach­ing stealth­ily through the darkness.

Come on, it COULD have been Big­foot. I don’t usu­ally stop to notice any details. I’m too busy run­ning for the car to see the blood drip­ping from its hideous, razor-sharp fangs. Take heart, soli­tary stargaz­ers. This time of year, the patron star of lonely astronerds sits low and for­lorn in the south. It’s Foma­l­haut, the “Soli­tary One.”

Look directly south around mid­night and you’ll see a sin­gle star amidst a large patch of dark­ness. The other stars in Pis­cis Aus­tri­nus, the South­ern Fish, are too faint to see from all but the dark­est rural skies. Foma­l­haut sticks out like Bigfoot’s big toe. The star’s name comes from the Ara­bic expres­sion “Fum al Hut,” which means the “Mouth of the Fish.” It is tra­di­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with the com­ing of autumn and the loss of sum­mer. Add to that its iso­lated loca­tion, and you have one depress­ing star.

Because it never gets very low above the hori­zon, it often takes on a dim orange cast as its light is fil­tered through the thick layer of air close to the hori­zon. Don’t let appear­ances fool you. Foma­l­haut is a hot, young star that burns with an almost pure, white flame. It has the dis­tinc­tion of being one of the first stars around which a disk of cool dust and gas was dis­cov­ered. Astronomers believe that such disks even­tu­ally form into plan­ets like those in our own solar sys­tem. Fomalhaut’s dusty disk was dis­cov­ered in 1983 by IRAS, the Infra-Red Astro­nom­i­cal Satel­lite, which was sent into orbit to exam­ine not the light, but the heat, ema­nat­ing from the stars.

Accord­ing to astro­nom­i­cal his­to­rian Robert Burn­ham, the Soli­tary One has a Bib­li­cal connection.

Most peo­ple have heard the story of Samp­son, the great Israelite hero and strong man who was seduced by the Philis­tine woman Delilah. How­ever, they don’t know the astro­nom­i­cal con­nec­tion. Samp­son derived his strength from his body hair, and men of his clan were not per­mit­ted to shave. Delilah learned his secret and had his hair shaved off. The weak­ened Samp­son was at the mercy of his Philis­tine ene­mies, who had his eyes gouged out.The Philistines decided to offer a sac­ri­fice to the fish-god Dagon in honor of their tri­umph. It’s hard to blame them. Samp­son had slain more than a few Philistines in his time.

So the Philistines had an enor­mous debauch in Dagon’s tem­ple in the town of Gaza. To add insult to injury, they paraded the blinded and weak­ened Samp­son before the assem­bled mul­ti­tude. Sum­mon­ing his last reserve of strength, Samp­son pushed on the pil­lars of the tem­ple, and man­aged to take thou­sands more Philistines with him as the falling tem­ple debris crushed him.

Dagon is none other than the star Foma­l­haut, which the Philistines wor­shipped at the tem­ple at Gaza. The temple’s rub­ble has long-since turned to dust, but the star remains as a sym­bol of Sampson’s power. At the time of his death, Samp­son was as alone and iso­lated as the star. Sur­rounded by his ene­mies, he was able to sum­mon the power to tri­umph. I hope it’s clear this week­end. It just seems like a good time to stand alone under the stars and watch Foma­l­haut flicker in the south. Watch out, Big­foot. Here I come.

Plan­ets

The early evening sky is still bereft of plan­ets. Bright Jupiter is low in the east by 11 p.m. and reaches its high­est point in the south by 4 a.m. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the rel­a­tively faint stars of Aries and Pisces in that direc­tion. Faint, orange Mars peeks above the east­ern hori­zon just before morn­ing twilight.

Tom Burns is the direc­tor of Ohio Wes­leyan University’s Perkins Obser­va­tory. Email him at tlburns@owu.edu.

Posted by Tom Burns on Sep 19 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.