Nomad (46 page)
Authors: Matthew Mather
Tags: #disaster, #black hole, #matthew, #Post-Apocalyptic, #conspiracy, #mather, #action, #Military, #Thriller, #Adventure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11yMkLUzCY
.
There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of the ecosystem of asteroids and comets, planets and even our Sun, and that from time to time, an object may hit the Earth, or the Sun may flare, triggering catastrophic events. But what hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.
It might sound far-fetched, but it isn’t.
In fact, much of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars (still random, but on a much larger scale). In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years of distance. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static.
But it’s not.
In February of 2015, researchers were dumbfounded to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a
hundredth
) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.
Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10
th
planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars. So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years (
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31519875
)
A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history (
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2125533/Global-warming-55m-years-ago-triggered-changes-Earths-orbit.html
). And scientists now think that a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star.
Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun. Which leads to speculation about the root cause of some large comet/asteroid impacts, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about.
And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.
But they’ve found nothing. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe.
It was Stephen Hawking who first proposed that the missing dark matter may be in the form of invisible “primordial” black holes that were formed when our universe itself was created in the Big Bang (
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/418126/why-black-holes-may-constitute-all-dark-matter/
).
Primordial black holes might have formed when Big Bang created a super-dense soup of particles, with densities high enough to spontaneously form black holes. Recent research results using the Kepler satellite have restricted the size range of possible “black hole dark matter” candidates, but it is still a viable theory.
Some theorists think it’s possible that these intermediate-sized primordial black holes coalesced into the super-giant black holes that form the cores of galaxies, with the left over matter of the universe cooling around these to form stars. If so, some of these primordial black holes might still be wandering the cosmos, ejected at high speeds from galactic cores during the process of merger by something called
gravitational recoil
.
Perhaps farfetched, but perhaps not—truth is often stranger than fiction—and this is the story of
Nomad
.
I hope you enjoyed it, and that you continue the adventure in
Sanctuary,
book two of the
Nomad
trilogy.
All the best,
Matthew Mather
July 27
th
, 2015
PS: Feel free to email me with questions at
[email protected]
For free monthly give-aways, advance reading copies of my books, low-cost promotional offers and bonus content,
click here to join Matthew Mather’s community.
Or visit me online at:
Nomad Video and Simulation
To see Matthew Mather running a 3D physics simulation of the Nomad encounter, just search for “Mather Nomad Simulation” on YouTube or click here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11yMkLUzCY
If you want to run your own physics simulation of Nomad, that’s easy too! The folks at Universe Sandbox have amazingly provided the tools to the general public. Just search for “Universe Sandbox” online and follow the instructions for loading their software (it is a full, 3D physics-based model of the solar system). The cost is $25. Once you have it loaded, click the top left of the screen to access the menu, then click “Open Existing Simulation, ” select “Fiction,” and click the “Nomad” tab to start the simulation. Or, just search for the “How to Run Nomad Simulation” video on my YouTube channel.
NOMAD
MATHER INC.
Tomorrow’s books today.
Copyright © 2015
Matthew Mather ULC
ISBN: 978-1-987942-02-6
Cover image by Damonza.com
This is a work of fiction, apart from the parts that aren’t.
Table of Contents
Thank you for downloading Matthew Mather’s NOMAD.