Magha: the throne, and the dead who sat on it, the gist

Magha: the throne, and the dead who sat on it

The tenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is marked by Regulus, a bright star that is bright partly because a dead companion handed over its material, and the tradition gives the station to the ancestors.

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

Regulus spins so fast that it is squashed out of round, and the best explanation is that the spin was not its own. A neighbouring star swelled up, lost its outer layers, and Regulus took the material and the turning motion together. What is left of that neighbour is a burnt-out core that still goes round Regulus once every forty days.

Look east on the right morning and you will see six stars in a curve, like a question mark written backwards. English books call it the Sickle. It is the head and mane of the constellation Leo, the lion. The bright star at the bottom of the curve is Regulus.

The curve rises first and Regulus comes up last, behind the others. From Delhi the gap between the first of the six and Regulus is a little under an hour.

Regulus is the twenty-first brightest star in the night sky, about seventy-nine light years away. That means the light hitting your eye tonight left the star about seventy-nine years ago. It is not one star but four, in two pairs.

The bright one, Regulus A, turns once in under sixteen hours, where our sun takes about a month. Spinning that fast has squashed it: it is wider across the middle than it is from pole to pole. In 2008 astronomers found a small, faint companion orbiting it every 40.11 days, most likely a white dwarf, which is the dead core of a star that has finished burning. The likeliest story is that the dead star used to be the bigger of the two, and that Regulus took its material, and its spin, from it.

The Indian name for this patch of sky is Magha. The word behind it means a gift or a bounty, and the dictionaries often give it in the plural: the bounties. The figures who preside over the station are the pitrs, the ancestors, and the symbol drawn beside it is a throne.

The essay argues that this makes Magha a station about what you were handed rather than a prediction about your character. Some of what a family passes on is a gift and some of it is just a transfer, and from inside the family the two look the same for years. It also says plainly that anyone who turns the word ancestor into the word debt and then quotes you a price is selling something.

Words decoded

nakshatra: one of twenty-seven slices of sky, one for roughly each night the moon takes to go all the way round
Magha (मघा): the tenth slice; the name comes from a word meaning a gift or a bounty
pitrs (पितृ): the ancestors, the dead of your own family line; the figures the tradition attaches to this station
Regulus: the bright star that marks Magha, at the foot of the Sickle in the constellation Leo. The Latin name means "little king"
magnitude: the brightness scale astronomers use. It runs backwards, so a smaller number means a brighter star
light year: the distance light travels in one year
ecliptic: the line the sun appears to follow against the stars over a year. Regulus sits closer to it than any other bright star
occultation: when the moon (or a planet) passes in front of a star and hides it for a while
white dwarf: the small, hot, burnt-out core left behind when an ordinary star has used up its fuel and shed its outer layers

Why anyone should careThe tradition hands this patch of sky to the dead, and the physics turns out to agree in its own way: the bright star is bright partly on inherited material. That is a far more interesting thing to think about than a personality description, and it points at questions anybody can use, starting with what you were given and who paid for it.

Read it properly, 8 min Magha: the throne, and the dead who sat on it