I don’t really like the concept of God, or the existence of anything ruling the world over the rest of the people. But there always has been this creature deciding what happens on the Earth, who lives, who dies, the amount of clothes that you are wearing, or even that day that you took a decaf in case you weren’t able to sleep at night. I’m talking about a colorful plasma ball that we all know as Sun, or, in Pumba’s words “a ball of gas burning billions of miles away”. We are in a great debt with the Sun, and to pay for it we should know who was responsible for lighting it up.

When the Universe was born, atoms, photons and other kinds of particles started to run away in an homogeneous way. Fortunately, some of those particles found each other on the way, creating anomalies on the density, like clumps on the cocoa. Through gravity interaction, these grumps attract other particles increasing their size and evolving into big, like hundreds of lightyears diameter, and beautiful clouds of gas and cosmic dust, known as nebulae. Nebulae were rotating and getting hotter and hotter, until a gravitational collapse occurred. This led to some conditions of density, temperature and pressure that allowed the appearance of nuclear fusion reactions, making atoms fuse to each other. These reactions emit radiation, which has associated a pressure directed towards the outside of the star; the pressure balances the gravitational force of the star, which is trying to compress the star itself. This is the  so-called  “hydrostatic equilibrium”, the first condition for a star to exist. For a better understanding, a star is trying to explode but its own weight keeps it away from doing it. By this moment, the cosmic night started to be illuminated by the stars, like in Van Gogh’s painting.

La noche estrellada, Van Gogh

“Pillars of Creation” taken by Hubble Space Telescope