Stellarium (Origins): A Space-Time Adventure to the Ends of our Universe (2 page)

Image 02
– Draco Dwarf Galaxy, 250,000 light years from Earth.

(credits and details on the final page)

It was December of 2035; twenty
years had gone by. It had snowed heavily that morning in Stockholm. By
nightfall, the sky was clear. Christmas lights complemented the scenery. Inside
City Hall, the Nobel Prize ceremony was ending.

At the end of the dinner,
astrophysicist Dr. Phillip Hardt was wrapping up his farewells to an old friend
when someone interrupted him:

“I couldn’t help but come over
and congratulate you, Dr. Hardt.”

“Allison? What a wonderful
surprise! You had told me you were going to come, but I couldn’t find you
anywhere. I just wanted to thank you once more...”

“And, once more, you needn’t do
that,” she said, interrupting him with a big smile. “The gratitude you
expressed when receiving the award was just perfect. Plus, Dr. Hardt, I had
very little to do with the results of your work. It’s wonderful in and of
itself, and, now that your work has been proven, a new phase in the study of
cosmology and space exploration can begin. You made history, Hardt!”

“Not alone! I’ve told you time
and time again, and you know very well that if it hadn’t been for your
discovery twenty years ago, if it hadn’t been for the excellent hypotheses you
advanced, if it hadn’t been for your calculations that something so minor as a
small black hole—a sudden singularity in space and time—had arisen in Draco,
causing the Valkiria star to fall out of equilibrium... if it hadn’t been for
your courage in proposing something so absurd,” emphasized Dr. Hardt with a
comical note in his voice, causing Allison to laugh, “I never would have
devoted myself to this subject and, ultimately, I never would never have made
this discovery... not to mention the last ten years you have spent working at
NASA to prove my theories.”

“It’s been ten years already... time
flies...”

“How are things going in Houston?
Do you have time for a cup of coffee?” asked Dr. Hardt, to which Allison
immediately agreed.

Much had happened during those
twenty years. Allison was now a well-known astronomer. She was 44 years old,
but her joviality didn’t so much as hint at it. After finishing her Ph.D., she
had become a professor and researcher at the University of Texas.

Allison had met Dr. Hardt at one
of the first astrophysics symposia hosted in the city. He was one of the few
people to actually become interested in her work on Draco, and he later began
researching and developing theories about it. Dr. Hardt was one of the most
respected astrophysicists at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
so his prestige and interest had helped her to gain more credibility in the
scientific world.

In 2016, after completing her
Ph.D., Allison got a job with the university’s Department of Astronomy.
Approximately three years later, she starting working as a professor.

It was 2020 when she published
her most important work—finally, the research on Valkiria that she had
visualized five years earlier. During that time, she had followed the star,
collecting data, and, years later, she was able to get her theory and findings
published. That was when she started growing her network of contacts, which
included Dr. Hardt.

Dr. Hardt spent the next five
years researching singularities in Draco, and how they were related to dark matter.
In early 2025, he finally published a revolutionary theory, consolidating ideas
that had astonished him for years.

It was a theory so bold that he
would have been putting his reputation at risk—in addition to being immediately
rejected by the scientific community—if it hadn’t been for one factor: his
theory could be tested and, eventually, proven.

Later that same year, NASA got
the funding it needed to launch a new space program. Together with the European
Space Agency (ESA), they introduced the “Stellarium” project. Their goal was to
send ten unmanned vehicles into space, over 10 years, in order to verify
Hardt’s theory. They not only wanted to test his propositions, but to master
the technology of the materials required to accomplish such a thing.

If proven, both the United States
and European Union would hold the knowledge necessary to revolutionize space
exploration. NASA would lead the entire project, while the ESA would help pay
for the missions.

That is when Allison (or Dr.
Scheffer, as she hated being called) was invited to join NASA. The Stellarium
space program needed an astronomer who was an expert on that local group of
galaxies. Plus, Dr. Hardt had strongly recommended Allison to lead the project.

Thus, Allison had spent the last
ten years with the program, now as a NASA employee, analyzing data from probes
and trying to map the topology of the new universe that they were discovering. And,
so, Allison helped Dr. Hardt to prove the theory which, several years later,
would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Today was a very tiring day,
Allison. Winning a prize like this is really a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The amount of people that want to talk to you, both in the scientific community
and the media, is paralyzing. I’m so happy to have found a friend who I can
talk to about something other than theories about the universe,” said Hardt
with a smile.

“Sure, old friend. And I need to
fill you in on the latest developments,” said Allison with excitement in her
voice.

“Yes, please do. The last thing I
heard, the Stellarium project was headed for phase two, right? I know it’s
confidential, but my contacts told me that the funds that NASA is allocating
for this new stage are much greater than anything they have spent up until
now.”

“That’s it, Hardt. That’s what I
wanted to tell you,” she explained. “Phase two of Stellarium is a manned trip.
We’re going to send astronauts.”

“Really? My God, you people at
NASA are much further along than I thought! But, how can that be? I mean, you
all have been sending probes through wormholes for years, I knew it was just a
matter of time, but I didn’t think you would get there so fast.”

The Stellarium project was
created by NASA with the goal of testing the theory that, by accelerating dark
matter, it would be possible to create mini-black holes, warping space, and
then sending probes on an instantaneous journey to another galaxy through
wormholes. Dr. Hardt was the astrophysicist who had not only developed the
equations that would allow for such a process, but who had also suggested what
kind of technology should be used to accelerate dark matter, a topic which, at
that time, the scientific community knew very little about.

“What the public doesn’t know,”
the astronomer continued, “is that the last two missions, of the ten that have
been launched in the last ten years, were manned.”

“Manned? What do you mean?”
inquired Hardt.

“After the seventh trip, we had
already more than proven that we were traveling through wormholes. NASA had
already mastered the technology. Sometimes, when the accelerator was activated,
the jump to another galaxy wouldn’t occur... the probe wouldn’t go anywhere...
just like your theory predicted. The success rate was exactly 50%, just like
you said in your article. So, after sending seven probes to places
approximately twice as far away from Earth as the moon, we had all the data we
needed to confirm that we were actually successfully creating wormholes,
meaning that your theory had already been proven. So, you should have won this
Nobel Prize at least three years ago,” said Allison with a smile.

“Humph!” exclaimed a pensive
Hardt, “but I understand. All the probes went through after a few tries and,
after they returned, you were able to use the images they collected to confirm
that they had been in Draco.”

“Exactly,” exclaimed Allison,
“the process worked, despite the fact that we never figured out why none of the
probes ever went beyond Draco. They were all transported there. For some
reason, the area in space where we launch the probes, approximately twice the
distance between the Earth and the moon away, has a special connection with the
Draco Galaxy. But anyway, we were left with this unanswered question, so, after
the seventh probe, once we had mastered the process, we were able to understand
that in order to jump through a wormhole to a point in the universe other than
Draco, we would either have to send our probes further away—for example, send
them to Mars and then jump from there, discovering where the probe was
transported to after it returned through the wormhole—or attempt a manned trip
to Draco, move around there upon arrival, and then make another jump back.”

“But that would be crazy,” said
Hardt. “We don’t know anything about the multidimensional topology of the
universe. If you’re in a certain spot in space, and you create a wormhole, jump
to the other side, take a few pictures, create a new wormhole, and jump back
here, that’s fine. Your location in space didn’t change, and you are relatively
safe. However, if you move around in this ‘other’ space and leave your initial
point of arrival, when it’s time for you to come back and you thus create a new
wormhole, it could take you to somewhere even farther away instead of taking
you back to where you came from... which means you would be stuck in a maze
with no way of going back. Why would NASA do something like that?”

“No, NASA isn’t going to do
that,” explained Allison, calming her old friend down. “We came to the same
conclusion. So, we decided to go with the first option and send the eighth
probe to a place even farther away. Mars was out of the question; we didn’t
have enough time for that. So, we sent it to a point three times the distance
between the Earth and the moon away. And that’s where we made a huge discovery:
at that point in space, the probe came very close to Valkiria.”

“How close?”

“Close enough to take a picture
that shows a planet in orbit! We named that planet Sater,” explained Allison,
with abundant excitement and joy.

“A planet? How fascinating! And
what is this planet like?”

“Well,” explained Allison, “we
don’t know much yet. Remember that the objective with this probe was simply to
try to send it somewhere in the universe other than Draco, but, unfortunately,
with regards to that, we were unsuccessful. It seems that places close to Earth
are always connected to that galaxy. However, on the other hand, the picture
taken by the probe showed us this planet. It is similar to Earth in size. It’s
very close to the Valkiria star, at about the same distance between Mercury and
our Sun. But Valkiria isn’t that hot. In the photo, we also discovered that the
star turned into a red giant. When we look at it from Earth, it’s between a
yellow classification, like our Sun, and an orange one, like Alpha Centauri B.
But that’s because it’s more than 250,000 light years away. In other words, the
star that we can see from Earth is actually a representation of that star’s
past, of what it looked like over 250,000 years ago. When we sent the probe
through the wormhole, close enough for a high-quality photo and good data
collection, we were able to confirm that, right now, it is a red giant. And it
has a blue-toned planet in its vicinity.”

“Blue? So it might have oxygen
and water? And life?” asked Hardt with the enthusiasm of a teenager.

“Yes, it might, or, rather, it
might have, because at some point in the last 250,000 years, that star turned
into a red giant, increasing in size and throwing any potential for life on
that planet out of balance. Anyway, it’s much more likely that life never
existed there. But the interesting part is seeing how this planet’s structure
responds to the orbit of a red giant. Indeed—an interesting fact—that planet
has rings, like Saturn. That’s why we named it Sater. It’s Valkiria’s Saturn.”

“And that’s why NASA is launching
phase two of the Stellarium space program,” she continued. “The plan is to send
a probe to orbit this planet, collect data, and, eventually, sometime in the
future, land on it. The problem is that this can’t be done autonomously. As you
know, Draco is more than 250,000 light years away... in other words, any
attempt at radio communication between someone on Earth and the probe would
take 200 years to get there, and over 200 years to come back. That’s why we
need to send astronauts. They would jump through the wormhole and release the
probe, which would travel to Sater to collect data, and then transmit this data
back to the astronauts’ spaceship. They would then jump back, without having
moved around Draco, and then travel back via the same spot that they had jumped
through the first time, approximately three times the distance from the Earth
to the moon. Then, they would relay the data to Houston and come home.”

“It seems like an excellent
strategy,” said Hardt in agreement. “Though it is very risky. But anyway, how
do you all know that it’s safe to send humans through wormholes?”

“Well, as I mentioned earlier,
the last two probes—the ninth and the tenth—were manned. The first carried
three rats, and the second a primate. NASA got special permission to keep these
last two missions a secret, as well as the discoveries from the eighth probe,
under the pretext of national security, so that they could carry out these
tests with scientific accuracy without having to worry about the influence of
public opinion. The good news is that all the crew members are doing well. The
trips were a success. In a few months, NASA is going to announce phase two of
Stellarium, explain the discoveries of the most recent probes, and let the
world know what’s coming.”