The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (heaven official's blessing novel english .txt) 📗

matter clouds. That would explain why yellow dwarfs are very frequently covered by these conglomerations, as if by a curtain.”

Holinger had already put forward that theory in her paper. It would be a logical explanation, but there were also counterarguments. A star should not just go out overnight. It would have to burn up slowly and would be observed for many years to come. But this was an interesting thought. He hadn’t measured the brightness of the stars on his list so far. Holinger rightly pointed out that many yellow dwarfs still shone on the spherical shell he’d introduced.

Could it be that they were already in the process of being obscured? Then he should be able to determine this by their reduced brightness, if dark clouds were really to blame for the phenomenon. If, on the other hand, he did not find a single star that had lost some brightness, that would speak against the dark cloud theory. It was like proving the theory of evolution: There must be intermediate states.

He needed to revise his strategy in general. He could learn something from Melissa Holinger. The commonalities he was looking for were obviously not recognizable at first glance. So he needed a second, a third, a fourth look. The data he needed for this was available on the net. Gamma, X-ray, radio, and infrared telescopes fed their results into the known databases. All he had to do was retrieve them, for every object he examined.

Sometimes a picture became more apparent when you looked at it upside down, or from a distance, or made a negative. The extinct yellow dwarfs might be hiding their common features from him. But what about the stars that still shone? Did they exhibit features that linked them? In the reverse conclusion, the absence of these characteristics would then be what constituted the extinct ones.

Peter wiped the sweat from his brow. That was going to be a lot of work, but at least it was not dependent on the weather. Today was Monday. If Franziska kept her promise, she’d be back no sooner than Wednesday.

He could wait until later to formulate the answer to Holinger’s email. He got up and shuffled to the phone in his pajamas. His penis was stiff because he urgently needed to go to the bathroom. He was a little embarrassed to call the secretary in this condition, but he couldn’t wait too long or there would be more trouble than necessary. He dialed the number.

“Robert Schumann High School, Secretary, God bless!”

“Amalie? It’s Peter.”

“Oh, you don’t sound good at all.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m calling. I caught some nasty virus.”

“Thanks for the call. I’ll arrange for your replacement.”

Ava would curse him because now she would have to take over the hated 9th graders in math.

“Thank you, Amalie.”

“Mrs. Rott is not going to be very thrilled.”

“Yes, I know. I’m hurrying to get better. Maybe it’s just a cold.”

Peter sneezed. He hoped he hadn’t really caught something.

“Gesundheit. I wish you a speedy recovery.”

It was pretty tedious to explore the universe on the computer. Peter was looking forward to when he could get back to the telescope.

He had to query each star individually. First, he looked up the object’s galactic coordinates, second, he entered those coordinates into the data browser, and finally, had to choose which telescope’s data he wanted to start with.

For no particular reason, he chose to start with the data from the XMM-Newton, an ESA X-ray telescope that had scanned the sky for more than 20 years and had been retired only two years ago. It captured radiation such as that emitted by flares from red dwarfs. Bursts strong enough to appear in the XMM data always spelled some kind of disaster for the star involved. At worst, they’d signaled a remnant of a stellar explosion—a rapidly spinning neutron star, that is, a pulsar. However, since Peter was querying the positions of known stars, it would be a miracle to find a pulsar there. A flare was more likely. For a sun-like star, it would be a symptom that the object was not doing well, that it was somehow out of balance.

Then he switched almost to the other end of the spectrum and checked the infrared sources. Every celestial object emitted thermal radiation, even planets or brown dwarfs, which otherwise cast no light. He didn’t expect too much from them. Yellow dwarfs, of course, gave off lots of heat, depending on how brightly they shone. He wasn’t anticipating surprises here—on the other hand, he didn’t want regrets later, or embarrassment, for having overlooked something that turned out to be important.

In the next step, he jumped back into the high-energy range. He focused on data from Integral, an ESA gamma-ray observatory. Gamma rays were primarily emitted by supernovae or black holes. His candidates were actually out of the question as an essential source for these rays. Should he therefore give up the gamma-ray-based search? No. It wouldn’t take long, anyway, because not many gamma sources came into question.

Finally, he tried the radio spectrum. Here he had to choose between different wavelengths. That was a challenge, because for a star in the northern sky, data was often not available in the same frequency range as for a star in the southern sky. Peter, therefore, limited himself to the north. That was still enough work. He compared the coordinates of the current object with data from the WENSS, the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey. It was almost 30 years old, but when speaking of the cosmos, that was very little time.

The result, initially, was nothing at all. He wrote and checked off the first star, entered the next set of coordinates, and again found nothing. He felt like the universe’s accountant. Does the universe need someone doing this? Couldn’t this be done much better by software? Of course. All the data is purely digital.

He had the right ascension and declination of the objects, i.e., their coordinates in the sky, and he had an astral projector