astronomy Archives - Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

An Image Of Worlds

by Arturo Sierra

No one who needs an accurate map of the stars will find a use for the Imago Mundorum. It doesn’t tell astronomers where to point their telescopes at, in the skies of their disparate nights; astrologers can’t make any mystical sense of planets dancing around the far away suns it catalogues, and it’s far too imprecise, even in its more detailed versions, to chart the course of interstellar ships by it. The map makes no effort to represent three-dimensional space, and the indication of coordinates in the z plane is poor compensation, so it gives the reader an utterly distorted view of our universe.

Yet, ever since Archchancellor Albrecht I came up with the basic design, not long before founding our Universal Archive of Human History, it has managed to remain a popular cultural artifact. Often updated, not always truthfully, it remains a bestseller in bookstores all over. As a huge fresco painted over the main hall of the Archive’s refectory, it never fails to draw up the eyes of tourists until their necks hurt, making it the pride and joy of our order’s ancient home. Yes, the map has no use, but it kindles true awe in the heart of everyone who sees it. All other projections fail to enrapture the soul as it does, accurate as they might be.

It promises answers for those who await a ship to come into dock at the orbital caravanserai, loaded with its precious cargo of perfumes and silks, not to mention invaluable terraforming equipment, newly engineered seeds, frozen embryos, machine- animas, and colonists. However vaguely, the map gives people the means to follow the progress of the vessel carrying word of a son who went away looking for fortune. It tracks the whereabouts of the many void-sailors who once fell into the hearts of landlubbers, with charm and wild stories, and who promised to come back after the twenty, fifty or even after the hundred Sol-years that their journeys might take them. It’s impossible to conceive how long it takes for things, people, and even information to travel between stars, but the map puts it all in a more human scale, even if it makes a lie of itself in the process.

Designed to fit exactly onto a standard sheet of paper, it mainly centers on the stars of the Hub Circuit, the nine systems connecting the paradise suns, the g-class, main-sequence stars that host the worlds most hospitable to life: Virginis, Pavonis, Hydri, Böot, and those beyond, the Herculis triplet, and Arae. Even more g-class stars are within reasonable reach, like Draper and Cordoba, accessible now that Durchmusterung, the steppingstone, has been sufficiently terraformed and colonized. Hanging on the branch that goes off from Ophiuchi Distans, the mysterious λ Serpentis is rumored to host one of the most beautiful planets ever found, though the Sagittarius Company, ever putting shareholder interest above all else, keeps a shroud of silence around the star without offering any explanation for it.

By contrast, the nine worlds of the Circuit are not so lush—indeed, except for Çierúsa and Guniibuu, they are often hostile to Terran life, yet their relative closeness to one another, on average at a distance of 5.5 lightyears, makes them an ideal nexus between the more habitable systems. Without the establishment of the Circuit, humanity would be scattered across distances too vast to traverse safely. At the center of it all, the Honorable Sagittarius Colonization Company has kept its headquarters at Höfa for over ten thousand years, and Gran Glisa, host to our order’s Archive, is so strategically placed that it has become the homeport of some of the most important shipping houses, even with a tidally locked planet and a star prone to violent outbursts of radiation. Understanding the Circuit means understanding how our human worlds are woven into the fabric of an interstellar civilization.

And the idea of a coherent human civilization this side of Sol is perfectly expressed in the map. That’s why the Imago Mundorum appears in the primers of children and college students alike, there to support the claims we historians make about the distant origin of our species, though Terra-the-Cradle is in fact beyond the page’s edge, to the left. The map is found in novels about love and strife elsewhere, in encyclopedias, and in any place where there’s a need to picture our human worlds at a glance. Even the great shipping houses use it as a handy tool for explaining to prospective passengers what route they will take from here to there and back. The merchant princes trace it with scrawny fingers to show the road their cargo has traveled from lightyears away, thus justifying the exorbitant fees the houses charge for their services.

A rich socialite will dress only in gowns of Comae Berenican silk of the most vivid pink, cyan, and silver. A poor, destitute family will cling on to a cup of carved diamond from Herculis, one last heirloom they haven’t dared to sell. Shareholders of the Company, thousands of years old, will fix events in their overtaxed memories with a drop of perfume, made from flowers grown under the orange sun of Çierúsa. A respectable grandparent will get a twinkle in the eye when struck by a memory of youthful excess and the splash of Guniibuunian brandy that was its height. All will look at the map and say to themselves: “this precious thing I hold in my hands came from there, so far, so long ago.”

Many a young boy or girl has showed up at the spaceport’s gate, asking to be let through so they can go up on a rocket and then out on a ship with many roaring antimatter engines, all burning as bright as Sol does in legend. They dream of 0.5 or 0.6 lightspeed, and the more ambitious kids will want to go on a fast post-runner, at 0.8 c. A copy of the map can always be found in their pockets, the seed of their dreams.

There are, of course, versions for all tastes and purses. Basic, functional prints for quick consultation in textbooks; streamlined copies for the quarters of high-ranking officers of the Sagittarius Company, who lose their good health over the nightmare of logistics that their terraformation projects entail. Powerful businesspeople have it engraved on their desks, with rubies and yellow sapphires to show suns, the names engraved with pearl, routes inlayed in gold and the background with lapis lazuli. It can be found as a splendidly decorated illumination, hand painted for the refined collector, or sometimes with dreadfully scary monsters drawn in the spaces between stars, in books for children and games of adventure. Those made for device-screens are normally programed to show additional information when the user selects this or that feature, but most people feel that this takes away from the romance of the map; it lessens that feeling of awe that overtakes those who stare at the paper for hours and hours, resting chin on hands, maybe sipping cocoa while fantasies run wild.

Perhaps you have stared at the Imago Mundorum and wondered, maybe you have thought about visiting some of these worlds or even about completing the Grand Tour around the Circuit.

You surely have no use for such a map, but it holds a dream.

~

Bio:

Arturo Sierra lives in Santiago, Chile, quite happily. So far he has lead a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

It seems that the first thing a fantasy author does, to get the juices flowing, is draw a map. It really is a good place to start, as one’s imagination naturally starts to run wild as it sees shores, mountains, and forests pour out from a fanciful pen. Space opera doesn’t have that luxury, not if it aims at a minimum of real-world science, instead of—as otherwise is perfectly legitimate—going full Star Wars and treating the Galaxy as if it were a flat continent with neatly drawn borders, places of interest, and regions of avoidance here and there. The closest thing to a realistic interstellar map I have seen is a rather paltry one for Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space, which makes one squint rather than imagine new adventures. 2D maps mostly end up being too abstract, 3D ones are impossible to read, for the most part. I wanted to get around some of those issues, making the map as realistic as possible while still allowing my imagination to feel tickled.
What’s presented here is an entirely accurate map of near-Sol space, up to more-or-less 8 parsecs pointing from Earth towards Sagittarius at the center of our Milky Way. The stellar coordinates, the stellar classification, and the distances between stars are real, though some convenient rounding-up has been applied here and there. Stars with proper names, such as Guniibuu and ε Indi, have kept them, but stars with only a catalogue-number for a name have been baptized with something a bit more stimulating. Some of these stars are known to host planets in the habitable zone, but I’ve not included anything about that.
This map would not be possible without the wonderful resources made available for free by Winchell D. Chung, creator of one of the last truly awesome places on the internet, the Atomic Rockets site, as well as the data catalogued in the Internet Stellar Database, curated by Roger M. Wilcox. Not to mention the Hipparcos and Gaia missions.

Fiction

Passover

by Robert L. Jones III

Initially, only telescopes could detect it — emerald green and shining steadily from millions of light years away — and the line of its arc was exceedingly thin as if etched by a laser. Seen via multiple ground and space-based observatories, its reported position in space was consistent. This meant it was not an artifact — a significant finding since the object’s circular symmetry was the first anomaly to draw attention.

As nearly as could be determined, it was unlike anything in the known universe. Suns and planets were oblate spheroids which bulged slightly at their equators, and the same could be said of moons if they approached roundness at all. The orbital paths of such bodies were elliptical. Individual atoms pulsated unevenly and constantly. The perfect circle was a concept unobserved in natural substance or motion.

The second anomaly had to do with brightness and contrast. Both were constant, making the entire figure equally visible by day or night.

Added to this bizarre optical property was the third anomaly. Observers noted the ring was expanding rapidly and without irregularity or dissipation — unusual indeed for a nebula or supernova — and soon it was visible without the help of instrumentation. The astronomical community was abuzz.

Opinions concerning the alleged expansion changed when independent calculations from around the world determined that, rather than increasing its diameter, the phenomenon was approaching at greater than the speed of light. Its behavior violated — or rather transcended — the physical laws of time and motion, and once this fourth anomaly was recognized, the fifth became more readily obvious.

The apparent thickness of the ring’s margin did not change with the rapidity of its approach. Whether viewed by the naked eye or through telescopes at various magnifications, it remained the same laser-thin curvature encompassing progressively more of the visible sky.

#

Scientists christened this unification of anomalies the Monad.

#

As it drew nearer, generating widespread and uninformed panic, the Monad eventually slowed and matched the earth’s speed and direction, following our planet while perpendicular to its plane of orbit. The subsequent, unchanging view permitted studies of greater detail, more thorough analysis. Satellite probes only swelled the volumes of data resisting interpretation.

Obtaining samples proved futile, for there was no discernable material to collect. The visibility of The Monad, even through layers of cloud, implied it must be reflecting, generating, or composed of light. Despite this logical reasoning, efforts at discovering an energy source were unsuccessful. Specialists and laypersons alike found the ring’s properties, behavior, and vacuity distressing, and they insisted that something — a mechanism, an instrument, a creature or deity — should exist within its circumference.

What did the Monad represent? Was it merely an unexplained natural phenomenon? Was it a message from an advanced alien race, or was it a sign from God?

#

Conjecture and hypothesis warily skirted the borders of theology.

#

Monotheists of different stripes appropriated the Monad as exclusive confirmation of their disparate beliefs. Members of each faction took comfort in the assumption that God was on their side. Among the more stylish intelligentsia, there was a revival of Pythagorean thinking — which was considered more appropriately impersonal — but in an effort to distance themselves from what they considered the troublesome implications of his ideas, scholars avoided referring to Plato and his relevant dialogues.

Like many reiterations of ancient thought, this latest version was less than true to original form. Intellectual trends restricted the Monad to no more than a symbol of divinity, and monotheists generally concurred. These various constituencies soon found themselves at odds with a sect claiming the Monad literally was God. Since the luminescent figure in the sky required nothing specific of them, all could remain comfortable with their doctrines and definitions. Then something happened.

The Monad accelerated until it slowly began to encircle — or, from all terrestrial perspectives, to pass over — the earth. Seen from the ground, it was a green arc bisecting the sky. Wherever and whenever it was directly overhead, it appeared as a straight line. The passage took several weeks, and during this time, the whole of human misbehavior abated. Wars ceased. There were no crimes or acts of terror. In retrospect, people evidently acted in accordance with commendable moral and ethical standards as if they had no choice.

This period of global tranquility came to an end with the conclusion of the Passover, and the Monad sped away so rapidly as to vanish from sight.

#

Reactions varied.

#

There was curiosity, for ultimately, nothing had been explained. The Monad was a mystery intractable to unambiguous resolution.

There was widespread resentment, some for the suspension of free will during the Passover, some for the resumption of hostilities at its conclusion. Those expressing this sentiment for either reason blamed the Monad rather than humanity.

Especially with the passage of time came disbelief. Many claimed the Monad had been an illusion or a hoax, and in a scientifically illiterate society, this was a relatively easy stance to maintain in the absence of ongoing visual contradiction.

For a variety of personal and doctrinal reasons, the rest of humankind held to faith. They warred with one another — sometimes verbally, sometimes violently — imposing assorted restrictions, obligations, and acts of devotion upon themselves and on anyone they could bring under their control. In their imperfect and ignorant ways, they believed in the Monad, and they trembled inwardly at the prospect of its second coming.

The devoutness of the partially informed opened avenues for commercial exploitation until web sites and retail shelves were burgeoning with a range of products. Available merchandise included videos, posters, and framed photographs of the Monad. Some of the items were genuine, some digital fabrications. Different corporate entities developed units which generated vivid, three-dimensional holograms, stimulating widespread demand for use in homes and offices.

Due to the limits of perception and memory, these imitations now seemed more real than the original. The result was consumption bordering on idolatry, but the craze was unsustainable. With increased exposure came familiarity, and with familiarity came boredom. Having in a sense made it trivial and common, people were no longer in awe of the Monad. As of this writing, new and used reproductions of its image are available at greatly reduced prices.

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a doctorate in molecular biology and is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, USA. His poems and stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star*Line, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and previously in Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

This story is the outgrowth of a personal interest in the logical and philosophical underpinnings of geometry. In my estimation, the monad of ancient Greek thought serves as a convenient symbol for deity and additionally as a focal point for various modern attitudes toward religion.

Fiction

No One Bet On Canis Major

by Andrew Fraknoi

From the United Planets Official Wikipedia, last edition before the Catastrophe

When, after years of acrimonious debate, the United Planets Council finally legalized betting on astronomical events, it was natural to exclude professional astronomers from those eligible to place a wager. But many commentators pointed out that astronomers were as likely as the next United Planets citizen to have extended families and close friends. What was to prevent an astronomer, after some productive nights on the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, from asking a drinking buddy or third cousin to place a bet on the next comet to enter the inner solar system?

Indeed, a number of early payoffs were eventually traced to insider information. Soon, however, astronomical betting became so widespread, that it didn’t much matter. After Asteroid 2045QY2 hit downtown Las Vegas (a random event with which the religious right had a field day), the hobby of astronomy became so popular that astronomical gambling became a major source of revenue for planetary governments around the system.

Early on, astronomers could earn some extra cash by suggesting new phenomena on which bets could be placed. With the solar-system-wide net of repeater stations allowing inexpensive communications between worlds, planetary gambling authorities vied with each other to come up with new games to attract gamblers not only from their own local populations, but from around the system.

At first, bets were placed only on the best-known astronomical phenomena. There were games guessing the direction and arrival time for new comets coming from the Oort Cloud, or the discovery of new asteroids above a certain size that crossed Earth’s orbit. Others involved predicting the Sun’s next coronal mass ejection pointed toward Earth and above a specified energy threshold, new volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io, or new geyser eruptions reaching above a certain height on Neptune’s moon Triton, to name just a few top money-makers.

Soon, however, the solar system was just not big enough to contain humanity’s urge to gamble and gaming authorities turned to the wider Milky Way. Suddenly, schools felt the pressure of teaching astronomy to all children before they were done with high school.

Popular longer-term games involved predicting the explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives and the detonation of white dwarfs in binary star systems. To the initial confusion of the betting public, astronomers called both types of explosions supernovae, yet the odds for the two different kinds of stellar blasts were different. Still, both kinds of supernovae were quite rare in the Galaxy. The wait between explosions could be decades or centuries, meaning that, if a lot of people played, a successful prediction offered the chance for a huge payoff.

Stellar explosions remained elusive even when the inauguration of GART, the Gargantuan Array of Radio Telescopes on the far side of the Moon, made their discovery easier. In earlier years, supernovae had been discovered by the light they produced. Unfortunately, there was enough dust filling the disk of our galaxy that only the nearest explosions could be observed with visible-light telescopes; more remote ones were hidden by that curtain of dust. With radio observations, more distant parts of the Galaxy were opened to our view, but the number of supernovae in the Milky Way during any human lifetime remained annoyingly small.

When the Mars gambling authority decided to expand the betting to include supernovae in other galaxies, and to allow bettors to select one galaxy, a group of galaxies, or even a constellation to wager on, the supernova game suddenly got a lot more popular. Scientists were quick to point out that supernovae were random individual events – given the scale of distances between stars, the explosion of a star in any given galaxy would not lead to the explosion of another elsewhere in that galaxy. Nevertheless, when, within a decade, three supernovae were observed in galaxy NGC 3190, lots of people put bets on that galaxy for a fourth explosion. That’s how government budgets grew and people’s electronic wallets shrank.

Other violent astronomical phenomena that eventually lent themselves to wagering included two kinds of gamma-ray bursters, the fast radio bursters, and ordinary novae (stars whose surface explosions brightened them but didn’t destroy them.) Gravity-wave events were too common to bet on, but there were wagers on the largest masses resulting from intermediate black hole mergers. Ingestion events (and even minor burps) by supermassive black holes – in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond – were soon added to the list.

When a top government official on the Moon was caught trying to get advance information from the director of the Joint Lunar Observatories (whose son had been quietly caught in a compromising sex TriD by the local authorities), new commissions were set up to isolate gambling servers and rule-makers from political influence.

Humanity’s addiction to astronomical gambling only came to an end when a large rogue planet happened to approach a previously unknown, but rather massive, black hole that had been hiding, with no previous sign of its existence, in our section of the Milky Way’s local spiral arm. Once the material of the planet was disrupted and drawn to circle the black hole, as luck would have it, one of the resulting jets of relativistic-speed particles was pointed directly at our solar system. The accompanying gamma-ray energy, coming at us from the constellation of Canis Major, wiped out most of our colonies on worlds that were not protected by a substantial atmosphere. And it damaged the Earth’s ozone layer and changed the composition of our upper atmosphere. Darkened skies, acid rain, and copious ultra-violet radiation made the life of the survivors on Earth miserable for decades to come. No one had placed a bet on that outcome.

~

Bio:

Andrew Fraknoi is a retired astronomer, college instructor, and the lead author for “Astronomy,” the free, online introductory textbook from the nonprofit OpenStax project, which has now been used by more than 1.1 million students. He has also written two children’s books, edited or written a number of books for science teachers, and published seven other science-fiction stories so far. His colleagues have named Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his contributions to the public understanding of science.

Philosophy Note:

Many studies have shown that, in making bets on unlikely events, we humans tend to overestimate our chances of winning, sometimes by huge amounts. Why do people bet? The anticipation of a big win gives us a shot of endorphins in our brain which allows us to associate betting with feelings of pleasure. Psychologists have come to understand the “Gambler’s Fallacy” – a cognitive bias in which we think prior outcomes of an independently determined wager will influence the next outcome. So, if you flip a coin and it comes up tails three times, you convince yourself that it now must come up heads the next time. For some people, gambling can become an addiction, very much like becoming dependent on the pleasure of alcohol or drugs. Many state governments in the US have taken shameful advantage of this addiction to fund services to their citizens, even including such vital things as education, through state-sponsored lotteries. In this story, I tried to imagine a future in which governments – always looking for new sources of funds that have few political costs to elected officials – allow and encourage people to bet on astronomical events.

astronomy

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