The common view was wrong, of course. Stars were born. Stars died. Stars moved at a pretty good rate of speed, but the enormous distances involved made any changes invisible to a casual observer.
Once it had been a massive blue-white giant with some rather larger companions. That nearest companion had drawn off some material, but the loss had been mostly inconsequential. Then had come the first explosion, one of the further off pairings had turned into a mutual attack. In that shattering had been sufficient ejecta that others had failed as well when the material had eventually fallen to them.
The star itself had undergone the same fate, growing fat and bloated at first, but then collapsing inward once sufficient mass had been obtained and internal heat was insufficient to fight gravity. An explosion took away a large section of its outer form, but failed to blow it completely apart unlike its companions.
Now a shell, a core, a fragment of its former glory, it had dimmed due to the material it had lost and become a rogue that travelled from its birthplace.
It spent untold millenia in this new state, so dim that distant observers might only find it by tracking in the infrared and then only if they knew what they were looking at.
Gravity was a constant though, and eventually the siren call of its tug brought the rogue to another system.
Here was a younger sun, steadily blazing away without the crowded conditions the rogue had known in its youth.
At long last, light fell upon the wayward star.
Doctor Kiyoshi Hino was not an astrologer. She did not do horoscopes or predictions. She was an astronoMER, which was a completely different horse as far as she was concerned. Some people got the two confused regularly anyway, to her perpetual annoyance.
Finding a faint smudge on a starchart was interesting, but one had to check a number of things before the "eureka" moment could be obtained. Just determining that it wasn't a glitch or bit of bad data could take days.
The younger sun blazed a little more fitfully as the wanderer drew near, disturbed from its usual activities as the rogue approached. The wanderer was dim to visible wavelengths but had an unusually strong magnetic field. As it approached, several of the system's comets and at least one planet were disturbed from their stately orbits and came rushing to their doom. More comets and other planets merely had their orbits so disturbed that their stately progression would never recover even if the wanderer just passed through without further meddling.
However, it would be quite apparent to those hypothetically viewing such events that such was not going to happen.
Material drawn to the wanderer's surface compacted, spreading out like subatomic paint as the gravity crushed it under its own weight.
Eventually a certain critical mass was met.
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(Posted Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:50)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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