“Fifteen minutes until the ball
drops!” Langley
“Whoopee,” Mary said, waving one finger in the air. She never lifted her eyes from her computer screen.
“That’s
not exactly the holiday spirit, Mary,” her friend Cal chided her.
“Maybe
because I’m working on New Year’s Eve, trying to get these images interpreted
from the satellite,” Mary responded tartly.
“You
chose that,” Cal
Mary
was horrified. “The images are being
taken now! I couldn’t bear to wait that
long.”
“Neither
could anyone else, apparently,” Cal Times Square countdown and was dancing – poorly – with a
giggling red-headed graduate student from MIT.
“These
are the best images ever taken of a Wolf-Rayet type pair, Cal,” Mary said
impatiently. “The resolution on the SMAO
telescope is good enough for us to see the discs of the actual stars of WR-104
that make up the binary pair.”
WR-104
lay 8,000 light-years away from the Earth and was Mary’s and Cal’s obsession,
though for different reasons. Cal
WR-104
was particularly interesting because the axis of the two stars pointed in the
Earth’s direction; the “pinwheel” which revolved around them was perpendicular
to the Earth and in full view of telescopes in the Solar System.
That
same position gave telescopes a perfect view of the stars orbital dance, which
was Mary’s specialty. She had written
her dissertation about gravitational anomalies in the orbits of stars, and
WR-104 was the perfect laboratory to observe any such problems.
“I
think Langley has a different kind of resolution
in mind,” Cal
“You
have any resolutions, Mary?”
She
didn’t answer him, but continued to stare at her screen.
“Mary?”
She
shook suddenly, then turned to him. Her
face was pale. “Cal
He
leaned over her shoulder, putting a hand on her back. He recoiled slightly from her trembling. “Mary, what’s wrong?”
“The
binary pair. Look at its orbit.”
Carl
looked at the data and the image and blinked.
The two stars of WR-104 orbited around each other every two hundred and
twenty days, at a distance of two hundred million miles. Except now the fuzzy plasma discs of the
stars’ coronas actually overlapped each other.
“What’s
going on, Mary?”
She
shook her head. “Some sort of
gravitational instability has broken up their orbit. They’re going to crash into each other. If they explode as a hypernova, we may get a
GRB.”
A
gamma ray burster, or GRB, was one of the most energetic objects in the
universe. A super-massive star
collapsing into a hypernova would leave behind a black hole – and generate a
massive pulse of gamma rays. Telescopes
had observed gamma ray bursts from the edge of the universe and from galaxies
millions of light years away.
GRB’s
generated a focused pulse along the objects rotational axis – like twin
search-lights pulsing straight out from the north and south poles of the
star. Radiation outside of the poles was
limited – within the beam it was apocalyptic.
Earth
lay directly in line of the poles of WR-104.
A GRB within ten thousand light years would deliver ten times the lethal
dose of radiation to every life form not shielded by a kilometer of rock or
water. Everything on Earth with a
nervous system would die, painfully and fairly quickly.
“How
long?” Carl asked hoarsely.
WR-104
was 8000 light years away. The collision
between the two giant stars, if it happened, had occurred before the Pyramids
were erected. Gamma rays traveled at the
speed of light; if the collision happened eight thousand years less one hour
ago, the rays would arrive at the Earth in one hour.
“I
think they’re about eighty seconds from collision in this image,” Mary
said. Her voice was quiet.
“So. We’ll know in half-a-minute.”
“Yes. Yes we will.”
As
they looked at each other, pale and frightened, Langley and the other
scientists joined in a group hug in front of the TV focused on Times Square, in
New York
They counted out
joyfully, “Ten!”
“Nine!”
“Eight!”
“Seven…”
