Anuradha: the star of company, the gist

Anuradha: the star of company

The seventeenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a short arc of four stars in the head of the scorpion that are genuinely related to one another, and everything in it, every star, every name, and the god attached to it, turns out to come with somebody else.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

In June 2000 one of these four stars started getting brighter, and it has never gone back. The best explanation is that a companion star came close and the star threw off a disc of gas in answer. The shape of the scorpion's head is not what your grandparents learned.

Go out on an evening in the first half of the year, face south, and find the one orange star low in that part of the sky. That star belongs to the next station, so use it only as a signpost. About a fist held at arm's length, up and to the right, and you reach the top of a short curve of four stars. That curve is Anuradha.

Those four are unusual. In most such groups the stars only look like a group: they sit at very different distances and have nothing to do with each other. These four are relatives. They formed out of the same cloud of gas about eleven million years ago and are still travelling roughly together, some 470 light years away.

Each of them also has company of its own. The top star looks single and is really six stars arranged in pairs. The second has a companion that swings in close every eleven years, and that is what set off the brightening. The third of the four is two stars whirling round each other in a day and a half, with a further star going round both of them. The bottom star may not belong to the station at all, depending on which old list you read.

The name fits the pattern. Anuradha means the one that follows Radha, and Radha is simply another name for the station next door. The seventeenth station is called after its neighbour.

So is the figure attached to it. Mitra is still the ordinary word for friend in most Indian languages, and in the oldest hymns he is almost never named on his own. The one job the hymns single out as his is arranging people: getting everybody into their places.

The essay takes that literally. A friendship has no ceremony and no paperwork behind it. What holds one up is somebody doing the arranging: picking the date, and making the call that has no occasion attached to it. Take that person out and the friendship does not end in a quarrel. It quietly stops happening.

Words decoded

nakshatra (नक्षत्र): one of twenty-seven slices of sky, one for roughly each night the moon takes to travel all the way round
Anuradha (अनुराधा): the seventeenth of those slices; the word means "following Radha"
Radha (राधा): the other name of Vishakha, the sixteenth station, the one next door
Mitra (मित्र): the figure attached to this station; an old god of covenants and sworn agreements, whose name became the everyday word for a friend
yatayati (यातयति): the Sanskrit verb used of Mitra in the one hymn addressed to him alone; it means he marshals people, sets them in their places, gets them arranged
Scorpius: the constellation the West calls the scorpion; these four stars are in its head, well away from the sting
magnitude: the brightness scale astronomers use; it runs backwards, so a star of magnitude 2 is brighter than one of magnitude 4
light year: how far light travels in a year; a star 470 light years away is seen as it was 470 years ago
ecliptic: the line the sun follows through the stars across the year; the moon stays close to it, so it can pass in front of the stars that lie near it
association: a loose family of stars born from one cloud but never tightly held together, slowly drifting apart
line of oblations: the old dictionary description of this station: a row of offerings set out for a ceremony

Why anyone should careFriendship is the one serious relationship most people have that comes with no rite, no register and nothing to appeal to when it lapses. It runs on somebody doing the arranging, and asking whether that somebody is always you, or never you, is a more useful question than anything a chart can supply. No arrangement of stars decides who turns up for you.

Read it properly, 8 min Anuradha: the star of company