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 The Ballad of the Lonely Star
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Miriam Mogilevsky, PhD
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Many, many years ago, A lovely G2
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star was born.It was, of course, our lordly Sun, Which now our heavens does adorn
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.But was our sun an only child? We always just assumed it so. Yet recent research shows us now  That there is much we did not know. We
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found an ancient
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meteorite That put us into quite a pickle:Iron should have dwelled within,But we, instead, discovered nickel
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.But iron 60 turns to nickel, And its half-life is obscenely brief 
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.So how could the iron have arrived
 Within the ast‟roid‟s
rocky fief?
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 Watch out for the footnotes! They‟re important.
 
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HAHA. As if. Maybe someday.
 
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 Well, G2V, if you want to get technical about it. That wouldn‟t have fit into the poem‟s structure, though.
 
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MS Word‟s grammar check HATED that sentence. I really hope you‟re not grading on grammar too much…
 
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In case you‟re confused by my usage of plural first person, I‟m writing from the perspective of the scientist(s) (and any terribly 
-paid graduate studentsthereof) who did this research.
 
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 And by “ancient” I mean, from the dawn of the solar system.
 
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 Technically, it‟s nickel 60, which occurs when iro
n 60 radioactively decays.
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2.6 million years. Yes, that‟s short. By cosmic standards. Actually the article uses the phrase “cosmic eyeblink,” and I love
that phrase but obviously 
could not utilize it for fear of running amok of Northwestern‟s academic in
tegrity policy thing.
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 Wow, this was truly a terrible stanza. I apologize. The rest will be better. It‟s just so hard to explain this sort of thing 
in verse! Basically, the iron 60had to have gotten there early enough to decay into nickel 60, which, acco
rding to my calculations, must have been, um…a
long 
time ago.
 
 
 Just one thing could be the culprit
 — 
 
 Though it‟d have to be close by 
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 — 
  A supernova could have done it,Making iron atoms fly.But how could a star have passed so close?Such a
theory won‟t pass muster.
 Unless, of course, the Sun was then A member of a starry 
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cluster.
 We always thought there‟s only two
  Varieties of these arrays. We group them based on density;
 At age, as well, we‟re sure to gaze.
 Galactics lie inside the plane;
 They‟re young and sparsely populated.
 Globulars are old and dense, Throughout the galaxy located
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. Which type could our Sun have favored? The answer is anticlimactic,For its age suggests a globular
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, And its location
 — 
a galactic
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.
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For instance, five light-years, or as little as 0.07 light-year.
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 AKA a star cluster. I needed another syllable. Plus it‟s cuter this way.
 
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Basically, galactic clusters lie within the plane of the galaxy, whereas globular clusters don‟t give a
damn darn about such conventions and locatethemselves wherever they feel like it.
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 The sun is 4.6 billion years old, meaning it‟s old enough to be in
a globular cluster rather than a galactic one.
 
  With the sort of hand-waving 
 That‟s common in the realm of science,
  We then declared another typeOf cluster in this cosmic alliance.
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 For it is clear that some young stars Are born in clusters very dense,So maybe our own Sun once hadSome siblings
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(and a white picket fence
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 ).So question is, why should you care?
 This cosmic family‟s long gone.
  And you most likely have a meeting,Or you need to mow the lawn.
(Actually, you‟re likely home
  And waiting for some yummy turkey,So you must be thinking now,
This so called “paper” is too quirky 
!
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 ) Anyways, back to my topic.(My apologies for the diversion.
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 The sun is located in the galaxy‟s disk, so it should‟ve been in a galactic cluster, not a globular one.
 
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Here I have engaged in my own literary sort of hand-waving. The scientists doing this research found other research showing that another cluster
(namely, R136), similarly exhibits characteristics of both types of star clusters. So no, they didn‟t just invent a new type
of cluster (at least, not until they found more evidence). I also hand-waved very significantly in the writing of that last line, which, as you may have noticed, has an incorrect number of syllables.
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 And by “some” I mean, maybe about 10,000.
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Being a sociology major, I can‟t help but insert a not
-so-
subtle allusion to the idea of the “American Dream” into my astronomy paper.
 
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Here ends a six-line diversion from my topic. Wait, what was that again? Oh, right. Stars and stuff.
 
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