‘Start,’ he typed. Now it was getting exciting. The telescope started moving. He counted 35 seconds and it stopped at the next star. He briefly examined the image and tapped ‘Visible.’ Again, the motors hummed, this time taking 22 seconds to show him a new star. ‘Visible.’ On it went. He’d written a script that afternoon that remotely controlled the tracking app. Whenever he clicked ‘Visible,’ it picked up the next star from the list and moved to it, saving him the hassle of entering coordinates.
He had gotten the idea from a sophomore while he was teaching math. Some of the girls noticed that he was often distracted, and out of curiosity, they asked him why. Of course, his personal life had no place in school, especially since his wife also taught classes there. So he told them about the missing stars and made a geometry problem out of it. In the discussion, however, they came up with the best way to test the theory, and one of the girls suggested a script.
The cell phone vibrated. He tapped ‘Visible,’ only then realizing that he’d forgotten to check the screen to see if the telescope had found a star. Bummer. But the script didn’t show him which star he might have missed. He let the telescope work. Odds were it wouldn’t have been a lost star, of all things. Unfortunately, the script could not read the screen and then press the ‘Visible’ button by itself. That would be the ultimate.
His phone buzzed again. This time he thought to check. ‘Visible.’ Buzzing motors, vibration, look through the eyepiece, ‘Visible’ button, buzzing motors, vibrating phone, check on the phone’s screen, ‘Visible.’ He tried to vary the sequence as much as possible, sometimes looking for the star on the screen and then other times through the eyepiece. He was getting tired, but it was not even midnight yet. Every clear night was precious. Franziska was away for a week. He wondered how many of those evenings the weather would cooperate.
Vibration, ‘Visible,’ buzzing motors, vibration—nothing. Nothing? Oh. He closed his eyes for a moment. The smartphone screen was running at its lowest brightness level so as not to disturb his adaptation. But for it to be completely dark? Even when he turned up the brightness, an area with only a few gray dots appeared.
He looked through the eyepiece of the telescope. There, too, he saw only black. No, wait. There, at the edge of the image, were a few points of light. Of course! He had already forgotten what he was looking for. There was nothing there, so he had finally found another star that was no longer visible.
His script had simply stopped at this point, so he saved a screenshot of the app, which also showed the coordinates. That way, he could check later which star used to be visible at that location. Then he restarted the script, and the monotony started all over.
March 7, 2026 – Passau
The rain pelted against the kitchen window. Peter poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he poured cold milk into his muesli and returned the carton to the refrigerator, sat down on the stool, and looked outside while he slowly shoveled in the milk-soaked cereal. Except for the sound of rain, it was quiet, almost too quiet, but he didn’t want to turn on the radio because it belonged to his wife. The kitchen smelled of stale cereal and overly roasted coffee. How long has Franziska been gone? It was Saturday. It seemed like a whole week to him, but it was only three days.
Good, then he could invest the weekend in his search. The crappy weather out there wouldn’t allow him to make any more observations, but this way, he finally had time to incorporate the two new finds into his theory. His spoon scraped across the porcelain, and he quickly finished his cereal. He washed out the bowl and placed it upside down in the dish drainer, as Franziska always did.
He sat in front of the computer with freshly brushed teeth. The intense scent of the toothpaste assaulted his nose. It was almost as if a blob of it had stuck to him somewhere, but he was convinced he’d rinsed it off thoroughly. Somehow, he was perceiving all smells more intensely today. Perhaps it was because he was alone. He did not want to call this state ‘loneliness.’ It was not perfect, but it was not so bad, either. Peter had always been comfortable with being alone.
But, he wasn’t alone. HD 10307 and Lambda Aurigae were with him. When HD 10307 was still shining in the sky, it could be found in the Andromeda constellation, not so far from the Andromeda Galaxy. Peter made a note, because there was an important feature. The yellow dwarf was a binary object that was orbited by the red dwarf HD 10307 B. HD 10307 A, the main sequence star, was a bit larger and brighter than the sun. Astronomers considered it promising for the origin of life, so a message had been sent in its direction in 2003.
Peter imagined the aliens there receiving a message from the Earthlings, who had long been considered violent in the universe, and thereupon they hid their sun with advanced technology so that no one from Earth got the notion to visit them. However, the radio signal would not arrive there for another 18 years, so it could not be blamed for the star’s disappearance.
Lambda Aurigae in the Auriga constellation was another piece of counter-evidence for his idea that only smaller stars could have disappeared so far, because it too was a bit bigger and brighter than the sun. Of all the stars that he deemed to have disappeared, this one most resembled our sun. Peter copied all his data into a table. He now had nine findings. He averaged one finding per night outside. If he continued like this for another week, he might reach 15. Would that be enough to impress Holinger?
He compared the data in detail. Apart from the fact that they were all sun-like stars of the spectral class G, he could not find any common features. The fact that all of them belonged to G was due to himself, because he considered only G-type main sequence stars as candidates. After all, red dwarfs with their possible solar-flare outbursts shone too unreliably, so the spectral class didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the process which extinguished the stars.
But it could. If that were true, who, of all beings, would be targeting sun-like stars? And why?
The spectral-class question still needed to be answered: Numerous planets had been found in the orbit of red dwarfs. But this class of stars had the unpleasant habit of regularly sterilizing the planets orbiting them by means of flares. The sun and its siblings, on the other hand, burned persistently and fairly steadily, which was conducive to the emergence of life.
So if you knocked out sun-like stars, you prevented or destroyed life. Peter had read enough science fiction novels to immediately think of some machine intelligence that had made it its business to wipe out biological life. But of course this was pure speculation. Why waste time on idle speculation?
For the last step today, he had to go downstairs to the living room. The steps creaked under his feet. He had always thought that they would need to have a lift installed at some point if one of them was no longer mobile enough for stairs. But if Franziska now found she preferred to spend her life without him, why would she still need the stairlift? Peter’s laugh echoed in the hallway. These were such completely pointless thoughts he had to shoo them out of his head.
As soon as the astral projector transferred him into the universe, such extraneous thoughts had no room anymore. He was back in the inner solar system. The illusion was so perfect! Once, shortly after he acquired the device, they’d made love among the stars. That had been a completely surreal experience—he hadn’t even felt the carpet on the living room floor. When the simulated, three-dimensional universe started moving, even gravity seemed to suspend momentarily.
The brain can be easily tricked. It has only a limited experience and can do little with the boundlessness of the universe. A pity, actually. Would this change in the future, when humanity would consider a stay in space as normal?
Peter took his cell phone out of his pocket. He had something planned. He quickly copied the data from the tracking app into the control of the astral projector. The image changed. Earth, Mars, and Venus disappeared. Instead, nine quail-egg-sized objects now blinked in space. Peter walked between them. He did not dare to call up the stored spherical shell again, because if the new finds
were not on it, he would be at his wit’s end.
No—he couldn’t help it—he pressed the button that brought the stored representation to life. A shell magically erected itself. In the process, it captured one blinking star after another. It worked! Lambda Aurigae was already sitting right. HD 10307 was a bit off. The apparent position in the sky and the spatial position in the universe were just different. The rounded, elegant shining shell worked its way unshakably through space. The sun had long since sunk into it, as had the five stars of the southern sky that Holinger’s team found. And finally, it was HD 10307’s turn.
He was right! All nine lost stars spanned a common spherical shell. Was that still coincidence?
Some would say so. Others, not so. He had to be honest with himself. It might look less like a coincidence, but nine was not a smoking gun. Fifteen would be good. Fifteen would no longer be a coincidence. He just needed to locate more of the lost stars.
March 9, 2026 – Passau
The weather sucked, he was running out of time, and then this news had to arrive before his morning coffee! Peter pounded his fist against the side of his chair until his hand hurt. What could he say about that? He started typing a response, but he couldn’t think of an argument. Frustrated, he scrolled back to her text.
“Dear Mr. Kraemer,” wrote the astronomer from Stockholm, to whom he’d emailed his results yesterday. “I understand your impatience very well. It afflicts us all regularly. It is a part of the researcher’s life. Ideas shoot up quickly and gratuitously from the humus of our thinking, but to let them mature into a flower or to weed them, we need a crazy amount of time, during which new ideas have also been sprouting, which also want to be nurtured.”
She was not a particularly good poet. Holinger probably worked in her garden as a diversion. Peter had never been much for gardening. What he liked best was an enchanted dreamscape like Sleeping Beauty’s.
“On the two additional candidates you have tracked down, I congratulate you. I can confirm that they cannot be found, even via the Institute’s large telescope. So the discovery credit is entirely yours.”
As if that had been his point! But it was probably important to many hobby astronomers.
“Unfortunately, the two new stars do not contribute to an overarching theory, at least as far as I could tell from a brief survey. As before, there were hardly any similarities to be found, and there should be if one were to assume a common cause for the disappearances. Apart from the positions on the spherical shell, of course, which, however, seem to me too insignificant as the only connection.”
Yes, he realized that, too. But how was he supposed to make progress if the weather didn’t cooperate? And if Franziska really did return, he would need to have closed this issue. Otherwise, she’d be gone away again, maybe for good.
“We will include the positions in our next observing cycle. My personal guess is that we will find evidence of dark clouds there as well. Perhaps there is a connection between the formation of sun-like stars and the existence of such dark 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 challe
nge, 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 that could generate a spatial image from this spherical data.
The only problem was that he had to merge all four databases—X-ray, gamma, infrared, and radio—in such a way that the astral projector displayed their entries as distinct objects. Peter read up on the documentation. Apparently there was an interface that allowed him to feed any data into the system. Very convenient. He downloaded, as far as available, the data of the northern sky, and copied them one by one into the online memory of the astral projector. For the different objects, he also uploaded four different 3D models that the projector could use.
He was ready to go! Peter ran down the stairs. It was quite cold in the living room, as it was already getting dark outside. His stomach was growling because he’d skipped lunch. Still, he hadn’t felt a burst of energy quite like this in a long time. It seemed to him that he was onto something, as if something was about to reveal itself that would surprise him. If Franziska had told him about having such a feeling, he would have thought she was crazy.
The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction Page 8