Two weeks ago, Señora Lume stopped at a bookshop to find me another book about the universe, with the kind of illustrations that make you stop and look. She knew that, even if it was a familiar gift, I would love it. And that she would enjoy seeing me enjoy it.
The first thing I did was look through the photographs. It is a habit I have kept since childhood: before reading, looking.
On one of those pages, I stopped to think about our Sun. About how it accounts for 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, and how it would take some 109 Earths, lined up side by side, to span its diameter. Inevitably, I also thought of Parker Solar Probe, the NASA spacecraft that reached around 692,000 kilometres per hour during its closest approach to the Sun in December 2024—a speed it matched again in 2026.
I always think about the people behind these projects. About those who had to work out how to build a spacecraft capable of entering a star’s atmosphere and still functioning.
The Sun’s visible surface is around 5,500 °C, while its corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees. Parker travels through that atmosphere without reaching the surface, protected by a shield that keeps much of its instrumentation at around 30 °C. I find it hard to imagine all the work behind something like that.
I also find it hard to picture its speed. If we could maintain it on a hypothetical journey from Earth to the Moon, we would cover the distance in about 33 minutes. Something we built, travelling almost 400,000 kilometres in just over half an hour. And still not even reaching 0.1% of the speed of light.
I kept looking through the book and thought of Antares: a star with roughly 12 times the Sun’s mass and around 700 times its diameter.
That comparison brought me back to something more familiar. To how our perception changes when we take a wider view. The same Sun that had seemed overwhelming a few pages earlier became small beside another star. It reminded me that there is always a scale that can put us back in perspective, however great or impressive we may come to feel.
Thank you for the gift.
Sr. Lume