The Orthogonal Galaxy (24 page)

Being the first to stand
up, Reyd and Kath took their lead from Joram and followed him to
another evening of research.

…

On that evening, the four
astronomers organized a plan to continue their study of the beam.
They used computer models to calculate the trajectory of the circle
around the Milky Way. After dispelling Kath’s emanation theory, the
team returned to an orbital theory. That is, their major assumption
at this point was that the beam was the trail of an object orbiting
the center of the Milky Way, since the arc calculated by the team
just the evening before perfectly represented an orbiting
body.

For a couple of hours they
tried to zoom in on the beam and study its undulating pattern. They
had hoped to orient the direction of its travel, but they could not
make out from the near-randomness of the oscillations which
direction any of the radiation was traveling.

After a midnight break,
the group returned to their stations to resume their work. The beam
was undulating on all of the monitors, precisely where they left
the telescope focused on it.

Shortly after sitting
down, Reyd turned in his chair. “Hey, Kath. What’s the forecast for
tonight anyway?”

“
Clear skies. Why do you
ask? Are you hoping to call it an early night, partner?” Kath
winked playfully at him.

“
No, but I do believe my
eyes are clouding over, because it looks like the beam is more dim.
I thought that maybe there was a light haze or perhaps marine layer
developing.”

Professor Zimmer squinted
at the screen from behind Reyd’s chair. “Are you sure it looks more
dim, Reyd?”

“
Well, it looks like it to
me, but maybe my eyes are just fogging over during these late night
studies.”

“
Joram, Kath, what do you
guys think? Does it look like it’s dimming?”

Joram shook his head, and
Kath shrugged her shoulders.

Zimmer slapped his
forehead. “Drats!” he exclaimed while stepping away from Reyd’s
station. He quickly pulled out his cell phone and paced anxiously
around the observatory.

“
Hi, Stan. Carlton Zimmer
here… Listen, I completely forgot that we should start a bolometer
on the beam… I’d like to use the AstroLab for greater precision,
and round-the-clock capability… Yeah, that’s all. No, wait… First,
let’s go get the tangential points along the horizon of the curve.
That should be about 7000 AU away… Thanks, Stan. I’ll be in touch
on the analysis.”

After hanging up the cell
phone, he could tell by the gaze of his students that an
explanation was needed.

“
That was Stan Rodgers, a
mission specialist at Johnson. In fact, Stan was one of the
specialists on duty the morning of the disaster on . Dr. Gilroy has
given me 24-hour access to his team, and this happens to be Stan’s
shift.

“
Anyway, I can’t believe
that I didn’t start bolometric analysis on this thing the moment it
appeared in the sky. We should be measuring its luminosity
constantly to see if we can determine what is emitting the light,
how much energy it is giving off, and how quickly the energy is
dissipating.”

Turning his focus back to
the yellow beam, he continued, “I just hope that the adage ‘better
late than never applies now’ because that is a huge
oversight.”

“
Professor.” Joram asked.
“Did I understand that you were going to get measurements at either
end of the beam?”

“
Precisely,” Zimmer smiled
at the observation. “As you no doubt had calculated, the orbit is
1.4 million miles away from here. At that, we can see about 7K AU
away before we get to the visible horizon of its orbit. By taking a
quick luminosity measurement at either end, we should be able to
assess the direction of travel, since one end will be brighter than
the other. The bright end is the one where the origin of the trail
was more recently attended. That will help us determine the
direction that this thing went as it flew by.”

Kath wanted to ask Zimmer
a question, but she was afraid that this might not be the time, as
he returned to the computer monitor where he stared intently at the
live images of the beam on the monitors. Focused on the image, Kath
whispered to Joram, “What the heck is a bolometer?”

“
It measures
electromagnetic radiation intensity. If the radiation is in the
visible light spectrum, it is used to calculate the luminosity. No
doubt Professor Zimmer would like to have the data on this beam as
it has come into existence. If it is the tail of some orbiting
object, then we can be certain that it will disappear. The rate of
dissipation could help us determine what...”

Joram stopped dead in his
tracks as the professor spun around with wide eyes. His first
thought went back to that first day in class when he was sure that
Zimmer noticed him whispering to Kath. He now thought to himself
that Zimmer must have a very keen sense of hearing. Joram began to
offer a lame apology for distracting the professor’s attention on
his work.

“
No, No, it’s not that,”
Zimmer replied. “There’s something I just noticed about the beam
that is very perplexing.”

The three students stood
at attention waiting for this latest nugget of information from
their mentor.

“
Come look,” he pointed to
the screen. “You see the thickness of the beam here. Since it is
dimming, it appears as if the light is not solid, and yet, I can
see no light coming from behind it. And now look at the edges of
the beam here. It appears that there is a dark band both above and
below the beam. Even where this beam is not giving off light, it
appears to be obscuring the light behind it. Reyd, can you bring up
the star atlas on the other monitor. I’d like to see what we’re
missing in the sky if this beam is truly obscuring its
background.”

Within a minute, the left
monitor had an image very close to the one on the right, except
that there was no yellow beam. This image was a digitally-rendered
simulation of the same section of the night sky for their present
location, date, and time. “Ok, so what I’d like to do, Reyd, is to
follow the beam to the star Deneb,” Zimmer said.

“
Alpha Cygni!” exclaimed
Joram Anders. “Great choice, Professor. It should be right in the
galactic plane such that it would be obscured by the
beam.”

Zimmer turned in his seat
and peered intently at his first-year graduate student. “Actually,
Mr. Anders, if my calculations are correct, Deneb will still be
perfectly visible in our sky. It will clear the beam to the north
of the galactic plane. However, Deneb—or as you point out, Alpha
Cygni—is the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus, as well as
one of the brightest stars in our sky, with an apparent magnitude
of 1.25. While it is about 3500 light years away, its radius is
more than 200 times that of our own Sun, making it about a quarter
of a million times brighter.”

Kath pursed her lips
together and let out a soft whistle. “200 times the size of our own
Sun?”

“
Yes, Kath,” confirmed
Professor Zimmer. “As you may be aware from your primary school
science instruction, there is an elementary analogy that
demonstrates the difference between the size of the Earth and the
size of the Sun.”

“
Oh, yes,” Kath recalled
excitedly. “If the Earth were the size of a garden pea, then the
Sun would be the size of a basketball.”

“
Great memory, Miss
Mirabelle. Now, if our Sun were the pea, then you would have to be
a giant to play the basketball of Deneb, because it would be over
five feet in diameter.”

Kath reeled at this
imagery. It was hard enough to imagine the size of the Earth, let
alone the Sun. Now to find out how massive Alpha Cygni is in
relation to our own Sun was simply hard to fathom.

“
So, if I understand
correctly, Professor,” said Joram closing in on Kath. “If the Sun
is the size of a pea—” he said bending over slightly and holding
his finger and thumb about a pea’s diameter apart in front of
Kath’s abdomen. “—Then Deneb would be a five-foot tall basketball,”
he said placing his other hand on top of Kath’s head.

Reyd attempted to suppress
his laughter, but instead let out a bursting snort that was clearly
heard by all.

Kath turned the corners of
her mouth down and narrowed her eyes in feigned irritation. “Very
funny, Mr. Anders.”

“
Indeed,” said Zimmer
dryly in mock agreement with the prank. “Anyway, Deneb will be very
easy to find, and it gets me in the ballpark of the object I really
want to look for—NGC 7000.”

“
The North America
Nebula?” asked Joram with some confidence in his
question.

“
That is correct, Mr.
Anders.”

“
Why that feature,
Professor?” asked Kath with curiosity.

“
NGC 7000, Miss Mirabelle,
is about the size of the Moon in our night sky. And it will be very
easy to see with our 26 here. While looking for stars only gives us
certain points in the vicinity of the beam, the nebula will give us
a cloud of ionized gas that we can use to find the border of
obscurity and perhaps measure the width of the beam. Turning to
Reyd, Zimmer restated his direction. “To Deneb, Mr.
Eastman.”

“
Yes, sir,” nodded Reyd
and gave a glance towards Joram just before returning to the
console.

Zimmer returned to the
telescope platform to dial in the adjusted coordinates of Deneb as
Reyd reeled them off. Joram and Kath watched as Reyd and Zimmer
worked towards the bright star.

“
How does that look, Mr.
Eastman?” Zimmer asked.

After a pause, Reyd turned
towards Zimmer. “Professor… I don’t see Deneb in this
image.”

“
Perhaps I misheard your
coordinates, Mr. Eastman. Can you please repeat them?”

“
Right ascension: 20
hours, 41 minutes, 25.9 seconds.”

“
Got it.”

“
Declination: Plus 45
degrees, 16 minutes, and 49 seconds.”

“
Yeah that looks right,”
Zimmer said shaking his head in dismay.

After several attempts,
the team had to admit defeat. Deneb was nowhere to be found in the
sky above the beam. Reyd pulled up both the live image on the left
monitor and the digitized image on the right.

“
I don’t understand,”
Zimmer said quietly. “You can see that the beam’s obscurity borders
are just below the indicated position for Deneb, and yet while
other stars are visible, Deneb just isn’t there.”

“
Deneb is a white
supergiant, Professor.” Anders suggested. “As such, it is in its
last phases of life. You don’t suppose…”

“
Supernova, Mr. Anders?”
Zimmer asked in amazement. “We would not have missed that event.
And what are the odds of Deneb dying precisely with the
beam?”

As silence ensued for a
few moments, the team pondered this new mystery. Kath was the first
to be heard. “Well, this may be a crazy idea…” Her voice trailed
off, as the entire team wheeled around to see what Kath was
thinking about.

“
Go ahead, Miss
Mirabelle.”

“
Well,
what if the yellow beam
is
the death of Deneb.”

“
Not a bad piece of
thinking,” Zimmer admired while rubbing his chin. “However, such an
idea would only hold under your previous emanation theory. That is,
the light would be emanating at the speed of light right past us if
Deneb had already exploded some 3500 years ago—the time it would’ve
taken for the light to reach us—and as we know, this beam is just
not radiating in that manner. But, do remember, Team that we must
not dismiss any crazy notion. Please speak every thought that comes
to your mind.”

For some time, the team
continued to stare at the two images. The next to break the silence
was Joram. “Reyd, is there a way to overlay these two
images?”

“
Yes, I can make a
transparent overlay of the digital image on top of the live image.
However, you won’t really see anything new, because all of the
stars in the digital image will simply sit on top of stars in the
live image.”

“
I’m not so sure that they
will, Reyd.”

“
What are you suggesting,
Mr. Anders?” asked the professor as he leaned farther over in his
chair.

“
I’m not sure, Professor,
but it looks like light may be bending towards the beam. As such,
the light from Deneb would be pulled southward enough to be in the
region of obscurity.”

“
Well, ok… However, keep
in mind that what you’re suggesting is that the beam is carrying a
vast amount of mass to produce the gravity necessary to bend light,
right, Mr. Anders?”

“
I know, Professor. It’s a
crazy idea.”

“
But… as I said, no crazy
notion dismissed.” Professor Zimmer conceded. “Go on, Mr. Eastman.
Let us overlay the images. Heaven knows I have nothing better to
suggest at this bizarre turn of events.”

Eastman worked the
keyboard quickly, dialing in the correct menu settings to overlay
the two images. The resulting image was a noisy chart of pinpoint
lights of varying brightness and size all over the
monitor.