Today's society is a star-saturated society, or should we say star-crazy society? Since we seem to know all about our Earth and face no more earthly frontiers, we have turned our attention to extra-terrestrial bodies.

We are interested in the stars: their size, temperature, and whether life exists on them. In 1989 Time magazine had a feature article on the sun, an "ordinary" star 96 million miles from Earth, 865,000 miles in diameter, with a temperature of 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. For 3-and-a-half billion years it has made life possible on Earth. It is expected to burn out in another five billion years.

To learn more about the stars, the United States launched Voyager 2, which has passed Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus; at a speed of 42,201 mph it approached Neptune, two-and-one-quarter…