Mula: the root, aimed at the centre of the galaxy, the gist

Mula: the root, aimed at the centre of the galaxy

The nineteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a pair of stars at the tip of the scorpion's tail, and directly behind them, about 27,000 light years further off, sits the centre of our galaxy, which nobody who named the station could have known was there.

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

The centre of the galaxy is not faint. It is covered. Dust lying along the plane of the galaxy blocks essentially all the visible light coming from it, so no telescope built to work in ordinary light will ever see it, however large you make the mirror.

Mula is the nineteenth of the twenty-seven stations the moon works through, one for roughly each night it needs to go round the sky. What you can see of it is small: two stars at the tip of the scorpion's tail, close enough together that a thumb held out at arm's length covers both.

To find them from India, wait for a clear evening and face south. Look for the Teapot, the eight stars of Sagittarius that make a squat pot with a spout. Go about a fist, held at the end of a straight arm, down and to the right of it. The brighter star there is Shaula, the fainter one Lesath. From Delhi they never get more than about 24 degrees above the horizon, and on 8 September they are already sinking by the time the sky is properly dark. Further south the view is better and lasts longer.

Both names have odd histories. Shaula was the Arabic name for a lunar mansion made of both stars together, not for either one alone. Lesath is a mistake carried down in writing. A Greek word for a hazy patch of light became an Arabic word for a spot, then a Latin word nobody understood, and someone in the Renaissance guessed it must come from a word meaning the bite of a poisonous animal.

Behind those two stars, and much further off, is the centre of our galaxy. It cannot be seen, because dust in the way absorbs the light. It was found by radio in 1974, weighed by photographing stars circling it for nearly 30 years, and pictured by radio dishes on several continents working as one instrument in 2022. The picture shows a ring of hot gas around a dark hollow.

Where it falls inside Mula depends on the ayanamsha, the number an Indian almanac subtracts to turn a Western zodiac position into an Indian one. Do that subtraction and the centre of the galaxy lands about 3 degrees into the station, not far from its beginning, and a different almanac's number moves it by minutes rather than degrees.

Mula means root: the part of a plant that holds it up and is not visible while it works. The essay notices how neatly that fits a station with an invisible centre, then says plainly that the neatness is the writer's, not the tradition's. No old text claims anyone knew what lay back there.

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
Mula (मूल): the nineteenth of those slices. The word means root, and also bottom, base, origin, beginning, the capital sum as opposed to the interest, an original text as opposed to a commentary on it, and in arithmetic a square root
Shaula: the brighter of the two stars at the sting, in the constellation the West calls Scorpius, the scorpion
Lesath: the fainter of the pair, just beside it
magnitude: the brightness scale astronomers use. It runs backwards, so magnitude 1.6 is brighter than magnitude 2.7
light year: how far light travels in a year
galactic centre: the middle of the spiral of stars our sun belongs to, around which the whole thing turns
Sagittarius A*: the name of the radio source found at that middle, spoken as "Sagittarius A star". It is now understood to be a black hole about 4.3 million times the mass of the sun
black hole: an object so heavy and so tightly packed that light cannot get out of it
ayanamsha: the number an Indian almanac subtracts to convert a Western zodiac position into an Indian one. Different almanacs use slightly different numbers
Nirriti (निर्ऋति): the figure the tradition attaches to this station. Her name is built on the word for the fitted order of things, with a prefix meaning away from it, so she is that order coming apart: dissolution and decay. She is given the south-west

Why anyone should careA root is the part of a plant that holds it up and cannot be seen while it is working, which makes it a useful thing to ask about yourself. Not what you believe, which is easy to say out loud, but what sits underneath the saying, and whether it would hold if the weather turned. There is a second reason. Handbooks and phone screens have made a small business out of frightening the parents of children born under this station. Nothing here supports that, and a station is a direction in the sky, not a sentence passed on anybody.

Read it properly, 7 min Mula: the root, aimed at the centre of the galaxy