FENRIR: Chapter 1

[seawasp]

 Today I begin posting chapters of Fenrir, my last collaboration with Eric Flint and a new (mostly) hard-SF first contact novel!

FENRIR

By Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor

 

Part I: Discovery
 

Chapter 1. Anomaly

Stephanie Bronson settled back into her seat and began working on the current draft of her thesis, glancing occasionally at the screens nearby. The Smyth-Nichols Infrared Telescope, irreverently referred to by everyone as "SNIT," had provide a glut of new images over the last month, and Stephanie had the dubious honor of sitting by and observing as they were processed for anomaly detection.

It wasn't all boring, of course; she'd been present when the computer announced it had found something that turned out to be a major flare from a previously unremarkable red dwarf, and had managed to catch most of the transition between a peaceful star and one several magnitudes brighter. Even small anomalies could be interesting, and if your field was infrared astronomy it was all potentially input for your work.

And in this case, it allowed her to do schoolwork while she was babysitting the computers. Win-win!

She settled back into her chair, wrapped in a long sweater and a knit scarf against the office chill; as seemed to be always the case, the thermostat was about five degrees too cold for her, and mere grad students were in no way allowed to change the settings. There were, fortunately, no restrictions in how heavily you dressed, so with a cup of the indifferent-but-still-hot coffee from the break room and her heavier clothing, she could still be comfortable.

Stephanie opened up the spreadsheet and started trying to pretty up the graphs for the main portion of her thesis. Established Ph.D.'s doing their papers could use the simplest, automatic presentation from Excel or whatever program they were using, but if you wanted to get there, you'd better make sure everything was presented clearly, unambiguously, and – preferably – attractively. Thesis committees were notoriously picky about pretty much everything.

A muted ping made her look up. An anomaly there… new star in the field. She flicked back and forth between the newest image and the preceding ones, then grinned. Stupid machine. Asteroid moved from one field to the other.

There were a lot of cases like that. In theory the system knew where things like mapped asteroids and variable stars were, but whoever had programmed it had either missed edge cases or made some kind of unwarranted assumptions, because there were quite a few objects that it commonly failed to match properly.

Sure enough, her studies were interrupted a few times each hour by "anomalies" that were nothing of the sort. Still, it did keep her awake, even if it did throw off her groove sometimes.

Another ping, and she sighed and closed the laptop again. Where's this one, she thought, seeing yet another starfield with a faint dot circled. A quick check of the references and she at least knew what part of the sky it was in. About in the middle of constellation Lupus, near Gamma Lupi. There was another, slightly brighter star near the apparent anomaly, but a quick check didn't give her a catalog number for it – interesting in and of itself, but not to the extent of the anomalous star. The dimmer star looked to have an infrared magnitude of about 10, which was still pretty bright compared to the limit of detection of the system.

She checked the prior plates; there was nothing visible there, at least down to the sensitivity of SNIT, which went down at least seven magnitudes below the anomalous point.

The next check was to see if there was more than one image with this anomalous point; electronic imaging systems could easily produce spurious points of light from various types of glitches. But, no, the dot was present on all images after a certain point, so it was a real something.

This was already more interesting than a lot of the false alarms. Stephanie hitched her chair forward. This change was also near the center of the image, and the location of the new dot seemed steady, so it wasn't an asteroid or something like that crossing into the field of view.

A nova? That would be exciting. Certainly a nova – or a supernova – could vary in magnitude sufficiently to make a previously invisible object visible. Feeling more excited, she composed a quick email to the SNIT team:

FROM: sbronson@SNIT.org

TO: SNIT Team

Subject: We might have something!

Guys,

SNIT found what really looks like a new object at about RA 15h 33m 13s, Declination -41° 06′ 22″. Checked and it's definitely an object, not a transient glitch, no relative motion obvious yet so it's not one of our asteroid or comet crossing false alarms. Anyone have a prior at that location? I'm thinking nova!

          Steph

She appended links to some of the key images in the database, then – after another glance at the mysterious dot on her screen – went back to working on her graphs. Discovering a nova was exciting, but she wouldn't let herself get excited unless and until she was sure that was what it was. She had work to do, and in all likelihood someone would call or message back and tell her what obvious thing she'd missed.

But half an hour later, her phone buzzed. It was a text from Shin Mouri, one of her teammates from Japan:

Can confirm nothing at the site of your putative nova previously, down to limit of about mag 28.

That was interesting, exciting even; depending on just how much the mystery object was radiating in the visible versus the infrared, that implied it had increased by something over 15 to 18 magnitudes – a million to twenty million times brighter. That put it out of ordinary nova range, straight into supernova or even into superluminous supernova range.

But exciting as that might be, she still had work to do. She returned, somewhat regretfully, to her thesis work.

There were a couple more false alarms before she packed up to go home and left to get some sleep.

She unlocked the side door that led to her apartment stairway and tried to go up as quietly as possible.

It wasn't quiet enough to fool a cat, though, and something soft brushed its way around one leg. "Hello, Luna," she said, and bent down to pat the snow-white animal.

Luna's yellow-green eyes met hers, then closed to slits as Stephanie scratched her gently just behind the ears – Luna's favorite spot. A faint buzz-rumble of approval came from the cat. "Yes, you like that, don't you? But I can't spend an hour doing this, I have to get to bed. You should be in bed too, silly cat."

Luna looked at her with exasperation as she stood, as if to say What? Your sleep is more important than properly attending to my needs?

"You are a spoiled little cat, Luna, and Joel spoils you entirely too much." Nonetheless, she bent back down and spent another thirty seconds on properly greeting her unofficial landlord (her official landlord was Luna's owner… or Luna's pet, probably, from the cat's point of view).

Joel Landon lived in the downstairs part of the house, which she'd never quite understood, since Landon owned probably a dozen different properties or more and could certainly afford to live pretty much anywhere; it might have had to do with his being widowed a few years ago and not wanting to stay in a place with too many memories. Why he'd rent his top floor as an apartment for college students she didn't know, but she sure wasn't going to complain.

Luna permitted her to move onward and get into her own apartment. Stephanie put her backpack down with relief and headed for the bathroom… and then went to bed.

An insistent brrr-brrr-brrr! sound dragged her out of the depths of sleep. She groped around to find the clock, then realized with a dull surprise that the sound was coming from her cell phone. She half-fell out of bed and managed to yank it out of her jacket pocket, where she'd left it last night. "Hello?"

"Steph? That you?" That was the deep voice of David Amitay, head of the SNIT team and currently also one of her thesis advisors.

"Barely." Her eyes focused on the clock. "Why the hell are you calling me at nine-thirty in the morning… sir? You know I had a late, late night and it's Saturday!"

"Oh… yes, I suppose you did, but never mind that, you're awake now." Dave's tone was only mildly apologetic. "That object you found last night? It's already proving to be very interesting."

That did wake her up. "What about it? I mean, I'm guessing it's a supernova, but that could have waited until, like, noon."

"See, we don't know what it is yet. But while we're still waiting on getting detailed spectroscopy, we did find the basic emission's IR peak. Which puts it at about four thousand Kelvin."

"Wait, what?"

A chuckle. "Now you're really awake, eh? Yes, about four thousand. For a star, that’s downright chilly."

That much was true; the Sun, not a terribly huge or bright star by any standard, had a surface temperature of six thousand Kelvin; four thousand was approaching red dwarf temperatures. Supernovae, by contrast, ignited at around a hundred billion degrees.

So if this was a supernova … "That's one hell of a redshift."

"Isn't it, though? As a matter of fact, it's a redshift that makes your unknown object the most distant object in the universe, trying its best to reach lightspeed." Dave paused, obviously waiting for her to answer.

"Holy crap. Even a superluminous supernova wouldn't have that apparent magnitude at that distance." She paused, thinking. "In fact, even a quasar wouldn't be that bright." The brightest quasar in visible light was magnitude twelve point nine, and that was one of the closer ones; distant quasars were far dimmer.

"Exactly." Dave chuckled. "Steph, we don't know what we're seeing. You may have just discovered something absolutely new. Maybe – just throwing this off the top of my head – quasars themselves can do something like supernova."

Astronomers are used to mind-bogglingly huge numbers; the universe does not build to a sensible, humanly-comprehensible scale. Even so, Stephanie found her entire brain balking at the concept of a quasar somehow going through a supernova-like process. Quasars already had luminosities of trillions of stars. A process that multiplied that by millions of times would mean that for a short period of time, a supernova quasar (what the hell would you call it?) would outshine entire galactic clusters. "Don't hurt my brain this early. I need coffee before I can think about this."

"Well, go get your coffee. It'll be a day or three before we get the detailed spectrum; that'll give us a much better idea of what we're dealing with. Talk later!"

"Later," she said, but Dave had already hung up.

She was, she admitted, no longer annoyed that she'd been woken up; if she'd been in Dave's position she probably couldn't have resisted the urge to call either. But Dave was also right that the mystery would need a day or so to solve. Absorptive and radiative lines in the spectrum would tell them a lot more about the target's composition, and that would almost certainly nail down a lot of possibilities – or reject some of them out of hand.

"Well," she said with a yawn, "Might as well get up and do things!"

That's having a job, Steph, you have to be doing things. :)