Over five billion years ago, a star went supernova, spreading its contents as a giant sphere of gases out among the stars. One large portion, by definition a female, met a smaller male cloud of gas coming from a different direction.

Then a miracle happened.

As her cloud of almost a light year in diameter met his smaller one, they felt the tug, the first signs of attraction. Slowly, over hundreds of millions of years, they pulled closer and closer together. When they were near enough, they each started their own deeper gravity wells.

But alas, their relative speeds were just a bit too great for him to get as close as he would have preferred. Other males around other stars were lucky to have coalesced within more reasonable distances to their mates. Some enjoyed a trip once every few hours around the object of their affection. They were the lucky guys who were able to bathe in their mates’ intense songs.

But what was a lonely male planet to do when he’s so far from his female but look and pine? Sometimes he wondered if she felt as lonely as he. For after all, she must be as unfulfilled. Now, she would only have him when she aged to the point where she would bloat and expand as a red ball, swelling to engulf her inner children.

For that was the way all stars encouraged the microscopic beings who evolved on their metallic planets to leave the nest in their tiny little space ships. As astonishing as it seemed, the huge stars and giant planets enjoyed the day when their tiny offspring would learn how to fly on their own and soar out of her deep gravity well. Few would return, but that was all right, for surely they could hear the songs and would tell their love story for many millions of years.

He recalled the early years when they had been together. She provided the heat for changes on the surfaces of her young planets. His job was to protect them from catastrophic collisions with each other and divert stray comets from disrupting them in their embryonic stages.

At least he was fortunate enough to not have met lesbian dust clouds, for binaries were all too common in this galaxy. When that happened, any poor males in their orbits would be ignored and would die a lonely death when the two giant solar orbs merged to form a black hole.

When he formed, he was about twice his current size and much hotter. And proud was he of his own “song” of radiation. For it was through their songs that they enjoyed their courtship. Their love would reach its climax when she expanded and consumed him, joining his hydrogen and helium with hers. They would be united at last!

He sighed. Until that fateful time, almost five billion years into the future, they would have to be patient. Extremely patient.

The waiting meant he was getting older. As he aged, he shrank. It wasn’t much, only an inch or so a year. But in a million years, it would be harder to put together the right combination of cloud material under his eye. His vision would blur and eventually he would not be able to see any planets at all while she would be only a distant source of warmth and song.

It’s not fair! He wanted her so much!

For the past two billion years, for only a small portion of each revolution around his mate, he had been able to concentrate the right combination of gases and pressures to create the filter for the color he liked the most. For a period equal to a single rotation of that active third planet, he would gaze with the most intense pining at his lover when she was “dressed” in her best.

He shifted his winds to accumulate yet another concentration of clouds. And clouds he had lots of, with an atmosphere over twenty-two thousand miles deep. Sometimes, in order to get the right color filter he had to strain, reaching deep to whirl a magnetic vortex under the large red spot. But it was his only “eye” by which he could actually “see” his lover.

From this distance, of all the frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, the color green looked best on her.

Every few millions years, more so when he was younger, he witnessed those rare events when asteroids slammed into planets. The most colorful was when one hit the third planet, for its normally blue surface would turn all white for a while.

That third planet was a strange one and drew more of his attention when he saw lots of tiny space ships burst out of its atmosphere and roam out to visit all the planets. Some came to orbit around him and visit his moons. Only a few came down his gravity well far enough to penetrate his atmosphere. Not surprisingly, those little fragile objects were crushed and melted before they ever got close to his small solid core. For he was so large and heavy that he only took in; he never gave out.

Soon, a few space ships left the solar system. Then hundreds, then thousands. Amazingly enough, some returned!

One day, he felt a change in his lover’s songs.

Millions upon millions of space ships left the third planet. It seemed like the entire surface of the planet must have been stripped to build all those ships.

She no longer sang love songs. She was ill and knew it. She changed colors for a few thousand of his revolutions as her fires burned up their fuel. Both of them were getting old. Then she sang a song of sorrow. She was going to die. They knew it would come one day since all stars die eventually, but it hurts when it’s your turn.

She convulsed and expanded, swelling to many times her original size. In that time, she blew a strong wind of her particles that stripped all the planets of their outer gas layers, even the frozen layers on the outer planets. He felt he was being stripped naked of his cloud layers, reducing his size to only five percent of what he once was. He was a solid core now. His abilities to sing and see had been blown away with his gases.

He was mute and blind.

She expanded until she filled the space out past the fourth planet. Her image filled half of his hemisphere. Her red and hot surface churned with powerful waves and swirls of ultra hot gases. Magnetic vortices on her surface alternately tugged and shoved on everything, including his solid core.

His mind was going, too. He could hardly remember the old days when they used to sing together. He hurt everywhere.

Then she stopped growing. For five thousand years, she stayed hot and red and swollen.

Her nursery of planets and moons were half gone. All the way out to the orbit of the farthest planet, nothing had an atmosphere any more. In the Kuiper Belt, bodies that had spent nearly their entire lives as frozen balls of ice and rocks had melted from her blast of radiation and particles.

Only those distant objects in the Oort Cloud further out remained untouched by her death throws. Clouds of gases there changed colors from her intense radiation and then glowed, revealing themselves for the first time. But there were few witnesses. All the space ships in the system had long since gone.

He lay in his orbit, hot and nearly dead himself, when she changed once more. Her swollen sphere retreated into a small ball. She kept on retreating, until she was only ten percent of her original size while her song changed to a mournful lament of lower tones.

Without her radiation, his temperature dropped.

And still she shrank and shrank. And shrank some more, until she almost disappeared, stopping only when she was a mere mile or so wide. She was a neutron star now, devoid of electrons and hardly radiating at all. And way far out, at a safe distance in a widely dispersed ring, tiny space ships came and observed patiently. And then they too left.

Over millions of years, the gases and particles she had shed spread out farther and farther, until they joined other clouds of gases.

Then another miracle happened.

The clouds merged and started to collapse, forming new gravity wells. The cycle of life and death began anew.

But for now, Jupiter was almost dead, harboring only his most cherished memory of his lover in her glory days. When Sol looked best in green.