Supernova era - Chapter 1

Supernova Era
End of the first chapter
In the universe around us ten light-years, astronomers have discovered eleven suns, they are: Proxima Centauri, Centauri A, Centauri B, the above three stars are maintained together under each other’s gravitational pull, forming a three-star system; Sirius A, Sirius B, Louidon 726-8A, Louidon 726-8B, the above four stars form two binary star systems; Barnard Star, Folf 359, Leyland 21185, Rose 154, the above four are single stars. Astronomers have ruled out the possibility that there may be some very faint stars in this space that have not been detected by interstellar dust.
Astronomers noticed the presence of large clouds of cosmic dust in this space, which resembled dark clouds floating in the cosmic night sea. When the ultraviolet detector mounted on the satellite was aimed at the distant cloud of interstellar dust, it found an absorption peak of 216 millimeters in the absorption spectrum, which is thought to be composed of carbon particles. Based on the reflective nature of these nebulae, it is speculated that the carbon particles that make up the nebula are also covered with a thin layer of ice on the outside. Dust particles range in size from 2 nm to 200 nm, which is an order of magnitude higher than the wavelength of visible light, to which dust is opaque.
It is this interstellar dust that blocks a star eight light-years from Earth. That star is twenty-three times the diameter of the Sun and sixty-seven times more massive than the Sun. Now it has entered the final stage of its long evolution, leaving the main sequence and entering its old age. We call it the Death Star.
If it has a memory, it can’t remember its childhood. It was born 500 million years ago, and its mother is another nebula. The movement of atoms and radiation from the center of the Milky Way disturbed the calm of the nebula, and all the cloud particles condensed towards a center under the influence of gravity. This solemn rain of dust rained for two million years, and in the center of the condensed air mass, hydrogen atoms began to coalesce into helium, and the Death Star was born in the nuclear fire.
After a tumultuous childhood and a turbulent youth, the energy of nuclear fusion withstood the collapse of the star’s shell, and the Death Star entered a long middle age. Its childhood evolution in hours, minutes, and even seconds is now measured in billions of years, and the vast desert of the Milky Way has added a calm point of light. But if you fly closer to the surface of the Death Star, you will find that this calm is false. The surface of this giant star is an ocean of nuclear flames, and the waves of blazing fire roar and crash with red light, scattering high-energy particles into space like a torrential rain; An unimaginably large amount of energy surged up from the deep center of the Death Star, stirring up blinding waves in the vast sea of fire; Above the sea of fire, the typhoon of nuclear energy is blowing non-stop, and the dark red plasma is distorted by the strong magnetic field, forming a tornado column tens of millions of kilometers high, like a red seaweed swarm stretching out into the universe…… The sheer size of the Death Star is difficult for the human mind to grasp, and proportionally, if we put our Earth on its sea of fire, it would be like throwing a basketball into the Pacific Ocean.
Originally, the starry sky of the Death Star should be very bright in the sky seen by humans, its apparent magnitude is -7.5, and if it were not for the interstellar dust that gave birth to another star three light-years in front of it to block its light towards the Earth, there would be a star five times brighter than the brightest star, Sirius, that would shine on human history. On a night when there is no moonlight, the star can cast a shadow on the ground. The fantastic blue starlight will definitely make human beings more sentimental.
The Death Star burned peacefully for 480 million years, and its life was magnificent, but the cold laws of conservation of energy inevitably caused some changes to occur within it: the nuclear flame consumed hydrogen, and helium, the product of nuclear fusion, deposited in the center of the star and accumulated little by little. This change is extremely slow for the Death Star, which has a huge amount of matter, and the entire history of humanity is only a flick of a finger for it. But 480 million years of consumption had finally produced the results it could feel—the inert helium had been deposited in considerable quantities, its heart, which had been a source of energy, had darkened, and the Death Star had aged.
But other, more complex laws of physics dictate that the Death Star must sustain itself in a spectacular way. The helium in its center is getting tighter and tighter, and the surrounding hydrogen is still fused, and the resulting high temperature ignites the helium in the center, causing it to also undergo nuclear fusion. All the helium in the star ignited a nuclear fire in an instant, causing the Death Star to emit a strong light. But helium fusion produces only one-tenth the amount of nuclear energy of hydrogen, so the Death Star is even weaker after this struggle. This is called a “helium flash” by astronomers. The bright light of the “helium flash” traveled through space for three years and reached the interstellar dust, in which the red light with a longer wavelength successfully passed through this cosmic barrier. This red light traveled through the universe for another five years, reaching an ordinary star much smaller than the Death Star, the Sun, and also shining on a few grains of cosmic dust that were grabbed by the star’s gravity. People call these grains of dust Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and, of course, Earth. It was 1775 A.D.
That night, in the northern hemisphere of the earth, outside the concert hall of a high-class amusement park in the British spa city of Bath, a German-born organist, Wilhelm Herschel, was greedily scanning the universe with a homemade astronomical telescope. The Milky Way was so strong that he poured his life into the telescope that his sister Caroline had to feed him with a spoon as he observed. The most brilliant astronomer of the 18th century spent his life in front of the eyepieces of astronomical telescopes, marking nearly 70,000 stars on star charts. But that night, one of the most important stars for mankind was missed. That night, a red star suddenly appeared in the western sky. It is located at the midpoint of the line between the α and β stars in the constellation Auriga, and the apparent magnitude is 4.5, which is not too bright, and it is difficult for ordinary people to find the exact location even if they know the exact location. But to astronomers, the red star is nothing more than a giant light that suddenly appears in space. If Herschel had not been hunched down in a telescope at this time, but had looked at the sky with his naked eye, as astronomers before Galileo had done, he might have made a discovery that would change human history for more than 200 years. But now he was concentrating on his telescope, which was only two feet in diameter, and the telescope was clearly pointing in some other direction; Most regrettably, the telescopes of the Greenwich Observatory, the Observatory on Herwin Island, and all the observatories around the world were pointing in a different direction……
The red star in the constellation Aurigaya lit up for a whole night and disappeared the next night.
One night that year, on another continent called North America, eight hundred British soldiers were quietly marching down the road west of Boston, their red uniforms making them look like a string of ghosts in the night. Gripping Mauser guns in the cold wind of a spring night, they hoped to reach the town of Concord, twenty-seven kilometers from Boston, before dawn, to destroy the arsenal of the “Minutemen” and arrest their leader, on the orders of the Governor of Massachusetts. But soon there was a white lining on the horizon, and the woods, huts, and pastures all showed black silhouettes in the morning light, and the soldiers looked around and found that they had only come to a small town called Lexington. Suddenly, in a grove of trees ahead, the little spark flashed, and a piercing gunshot pierced the silent dawn of North America. This was followed by the chirping of bullets through the air – the first wriggling of the United States of America, conceived in the mother’s womb.
But on that vast continent across the Pacific Ocean, an ancient civilization has lasted for 5,000 years. At this time, there were many people in this ancient land who were traveling day and night to Kyoto in the ancient country, carrying a large number of ancient books collected from various parts of the ancient country. The book collection for the compilation of the Shiku Quanshu was handed down two years ago, and the vast land of ancient books is still flowing to Kyoto like countless streams. In a huge wooden hall in the Forbidden City, the Qianlong Emperor is paralyzing among the endless rows of bookshelves that have been collected for two years for the Siku Quanshu, which have been placed on these huge bookshelves in four categories: classics, histories, sub-books, and collections. The Emperor left his attendants outside the door and cautiously walked into the huge library. Leading the way for him to make lanterns were three people wearing scholarly feathers, they were Dai Zhen, Yao Nai, and Ji Yun. Unlike those nominal imperial relatives, they are the real compilers of the Siku Quanshu. Tall bookshelves slowly moved past the four of them, and in the dim light of the lanterns, they seemed to be passing through the black walls. They came to a pile of ancient bamboo slips. Emperor Qianlong trembled and picked up a bundle, and in the yellow light of the lantern shaking, a few small points of light were reflected on the bamboo slips, as if they were pupils in ancient times. Qianlong gently put down the bamboo slip and looked around, he felt as if he was in the deep canyon of the Book Mountain, this is the canyon of the Mountain of Years, between the cliffs of this book, countless ghosts of five thousand years are quietly flying up.
“The deceased, Your Majesty.” A codifier whispered.
In that unimaginably far outer space, the Death Star continues to walk towards its own end. Several more helium flashes occurred, but on a smaller scale than the first, and the carbon and oxygen produced by helium fusion formed a new core. Immediately afterward, the carbon-oxygen core was ignited, producing heavier elements of neon, sulfur and silicon. At this time, a large number of neutrinos appear in the star, ghostly particles that do not interact with any matter, constantly taking away the energy of the core. Gradually, the nuclear fusion at the center of the Death Star was no longer able to support its heavy shell, and the gravitational pull that had created the Death Star now did the opposite, and the Death Star collapsed under the gravitational pull into a dense ball. The atoms that make it up are crushed under incredible pressure, and neutrons and neutrons are squeezed together. At this time, a teaspoon of matter on the Death Star weighs a billion tons. It was the core that collapsed first, and then the shell, which had lost its support, also collapsed, violently striking the dense core, igniting the nuclear reaction for the last time in an instant.
The epic of 500 million years of gravity and fire is over, a snow-bright lightning bolt tears the universe apart, and the Death Star turns into billions of pieces of debris and huge amounts of dust. The powerful energy turned into a torrent of electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles, surging in all directions of the universe at the speed of light. Three years after the Death Star erupted, a wave of energy easily pushed away the interstellar dust and swooped down on the sun.
At the time of the Death Star’s eruption, humanity eight light-years away was in its prime. Although they had long known that they were living on a small speck of dust in the universe, they did not psychologically accept this fact. In the century that has passed, they have mastered the enormous energy of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, and they have built complex intelligent machines with electrical impulses imprisoned in silicon wafers, and they think they have mastered the power to conquer the universe. No one knew that the energy of the Death Star was rushing at the speed of light day and night on the tiny blue planet.
After the bright light of the Death Star passed through the constellation Sagittarius, it traveled in the cold and desert outer space for another four years, and finally reached the outer reaches of the solar system. In the space where the comet without a comet tail roams, the energy of the Death Star made its first indirect contact with mankind: more than a billion kilometers away from the earth, there is a man-made object that is trudging lonely towards the sea of stars in the Milky Way, this is the “Voyager” interstellar probe that set off from Earth in the seventies of the twentieth century. It resembles a strangely shaped umbrella with a parabolic antenna aimed at the Earth. The probe carried a human business card, a lead alloy plate with two naked people, and a record containing the greetings of the United Nations Secretary-General to extraterrestrial civilizations, as well as the sound of the earth’s sea, the chirping of birds, and the ancient Chinese song “Flowing Water”. This emissary sent by humanity to the galaxy first experienced the harshness of the universe, and as soon as it entered the sea of light of the Death Star, it immediately turned into a pile of fiery metal. The umbrella antenna is deformed and distorted by a sudden increase in temperature from a low temperature close to absolute zero; The Geiger counter, which detects high-energy rays, is saturated due to excessive ray intensity, and the reading is zero; Only the ultraviolet light detector and magnetometer worked normally for two seconds, and before the integrated circuits were destroyed by high-energy rays, the Voyager’s computer sent back a string of observations to Earth that made it incredible. Due to damage to the transmitting antennas, the high-sensitivity antenna arrays located in Nevada and Australia will never receive this string of data. But it doesn’t matter anymore, humans will soon be able to measure for themselves everything they can’t believe.
The bright light of the Death Star crossed Pluto, the boundary of the solar system, and stirred up a cloud of vapor in its blue crystals of solid nitrogen; Soon, the bright light passed over Uranus and Neptune, making their rings crystal clear; Passing past Saturn and Jupiter (at this time, in Beijing, where the evening party of the graduating class of primary school had just begun), the wind of high-energy particles set off a burst of phosphorescence on the surface of their liquid; The energy of the Death Star flew at the speed of light for another hour and a half, reaching the Moon, and the Copernicus crater and the Rain Sea Plains emitted a blinding white light. The light of the Death Star also illuminates the row of human footprints on the Plains of the Rainy Sea, which Armstrong and Aldrin left behind forty years ago, when hundreds of millions of people on the blue planet not far away were watching them on television, and many people thought the universe was for them at that exciting moment.
Another second passed, and the light of the Death Star, which had been walking in space for eight years, reached Earth.
Chapter 2: The Night Sky is Blazing
It’s noon!
This is the first feeling after the children’s eyesight is restored, the bright light just now appeared too suddenly, as if someone suddenly turned on the switch of a large electric light in the universe, making them temporarily blind.
It was twenty-eighteen, but the children were indeed standing under the noonday clear sky! Looking up at the blue sky, they gasped. This is by no means the kind of blue sky that people used to see, this sky is amazingly blue, so blue that it is black, like the colors recorded in ultra-restored color film; And this sky seems to be extremely pure, as if the slightly gray sky of the past has been stripped of a layer of skin, and the pure blue of this sky is like fresh meat under the skin, as if it is about to bleed. The city was lit up by the sun, and the children screamed in amazement when they looked at the sun.
That’s not the sun of man!
The sudden glare of the sun in the night sky made it impossible for the children to look at it. They glanced through their fingers and saw that the sun was not round, it had no shape. In fact, its entity appears to be a point of light on Earth like a star, with a bright white light bursting out from a point in the universe. However, due to the extreme intensity of the light it emits (the apparent magnitude is -51.23, almost twice that of the Sun), it does not look small. The light it emitted was scattered by the atmosphere, like a huge and piercing poisonous spider hanging in the western sky.
The Death Star appears suddenly, reaching its maximum brightness within a few seconds. People in the Eastern Hemisphere saw it first. This was followed by the greatest panic in the history of mankind, when almost all people lost their normal judgment and ability to act, and the whole world froze. The most spectacular sightings were seen in the Atlantic Ocean and on the west coast of Europe and Africa, and here is one sighting from the Atlantic:
At sunrise, we noticed an anomaly: after the sun rose above the sea, there was still a bright light shining from the sea-sky line in the east, which was a white light, radiating from an invisible light source under the sea level, as if a giant lamp was shining under the sea surface in the east. The light grew stronger. The sight was so eerie, all the people on board were in a commotion, and there was a noise of noise on the radio and radio. As the second dawn became brighter and brighter, the “morning glow” formed by a few clouds on the horizon also emitted a dazzling white light, like a large incandescent filament…… Our fear grows with the light, and everyone knows that the light is going to rise, and no one knows what they will see. Finally, three hours after sunrise, we witnessed a second sunrise. The captain later had a quote that described the new sun very aptly: it was as if there was a giant welding in the universe! When these two suns appear in the sky at the same time, it looks even more terrible than our old sun: because it is much weaker than the new sun, it looks dark in comparison, and it becomes a black sun! This nightmarish sight is not for everyone, with some running wildly on the deck and others jumping into the sea……
(Excerpt from “Witnessing the Death Star”, Albert S. G. Harris, London, Supernova Era 6 Edition)
Before the children in the playground could come to their senses, lightning appeared in the sky, caused by the ionization of the atmosphere by the rays of the Death Star. Long purple arcs appeared in the pure blue sky, getting denser and denser, and the thunder was deafening.
“Quick! Go back to the classroom! Teacher Zheng shouted. The children ran towards the school building, everyone clutching their heads, and thunder exploded above them, as if the whole world was falling apart. After running into the classroom, the children trembled and huddled around the teacher. The light of the Death Star filtered in through one side window, casting bright squares on the floor; The other window was filled with lightning, and the blue-purple electric light flickered sharply in this half of the classroom. The air began to fill with static electricity, and the small metal pieces on the man’s clothes all crackled and flashed small sparks; The hairs on the skin stand on end, making people feel itchy; The surrounding objects were piercing their hands as if they had thorns.
The following are the communication records of the Russian Mir space station at the Baiknur Space Center in the Cossack Republic after the appearance of the Death Star, as well as the U.S. space shuttle Zeus, the last working group before the scheduled crash of the Mir space station.
Commander: D.A. Voltsev
Flight control engineer: B.G. Zinovich
Mechanical engineer: Ю.N. Biekovsky
Ecological Engineer: F. Levson
Space Station Doctor: Nikita Kosnolenko
Crew: Doctor of Solid State Physics J.O. Lamir, Doctor of Astrophysics Alexander Andreev
Electromagnetic Wave Communication Section:
10:20:10 (10:20:10) Mir: Don calls Baiknur! Don calls Baiknur! Base, hear please answer, base, hear please answer……
(No answer, strong interference noise)
10:21:30 Base: This is the Baiknur base! Base calls the Don, please answer……
(No answer, strong interference noise)
…………
The following is the infrared laser communication part:
10:23:20 Mir: Base, this is Mir! The main system is too noisy, we have enabled a backup communication system, please answer!
10:23:25 Base: We hear you, but the signal is unstable.
10:23:28 Mir: The orientation of the transmitting and receiving units is difficult, and the integrated block of the directional control circuit fails under the rays, so we have to use optical manual orientation.
10:23:37 Base: Fix the transmitting and receiving units, we will take control.
10:23:42 Mir: Done.
10:23:43 Base: Signal is normal!
10:23:46 Mir: Base, can you tell us what’s going on now? What do we call that thing that pops up?
10:23:56 Base: We know as much as you do. As for the title, let’s call it X star! Please send us the data you got.
10:24:01 Mir: The following is the observation data of the integrated radiometer, ultraviolet observer, gamma ray observatory, gravitational meter, magnetometer, Geiger counter, solar wind intensity meter and neutrino detector from 10 o’clock, with 136 visible and infrared photographs, pay attention to the reception.
10:24:30 Mir: (data transmission)
10:25:00 Mir: Our space telescope has been tracking the X-star since it appeared, and with our accuracy we have not been able to measure its angular diameter, nor have we found significant parallax. Dr. Andreev believes that from the above two points and the energy we receive, Star X is outside the solar system. Of course, this is just conjecture, and there is not enough data at present, and many things have to be done by terrestrial observatories.
10:25:30 Base: What do you see on Earth?
10:25:36 Mir: There is a large hurricane blowing northward in the equatorial region, and the wind speed is estimated to be close to 60 meters per second, which we estimate from the changes in the equatorial cloud mass. This may be caused by the sudden uneven heat exerted by the X-star on Earth. Oh, there is a lot of ultraviolet radiation and blue flashes in the polar regions, probably lightning, which are spreading to lower latitudes.
10:26:50 Base: Now report on your situation.
10:27:05 Mir: It’s not good. The spacecraft’s flight control computer systems were all destroyed by high-energy rays, as were the backup systems, and its lead shield was rendered useless. The monocrystalline silicon solar cells are all destroyed by rays, and the chemical fuel cells are seriously damaged, and we can only rely on the isotope battery in the middle cabin for power supply, and the power is seriously insufficient, so we have to turn off the ecological circulation system of the integrated cabin, and the ecological circulation system of the living module is not working properly, and we will soon wear a spacesuit.
10:28:20 Base: The base believes that it is no longer suitable to stay in orbit under the current circumstances, and at the same time, judging from the damage to the system, a soft landing is no longer possible. The U.S. space shuttle Zeus is now in low orbit 3340, and they are in the shadow of the Earth, with less damage and re-entry capability. We have successfully communicated with them, and the Americans have decided to fulfill the provisions of the International Agreement on the Development of Near-Earth Space with regard to space rescue for astronauts and to receive your transfer. The braking program and engine action parameters are……
10:30:33 Mir: Attention Base, the space station doctor is going to talk to you.
10:30:40 Mir: I’m a space station doctor, I don’t think the transfer is pointless, and I ask for it to be canceled.
10:30:46 Base: Please explain.
10:30:48 Mir: All the astronauts on the space station have been exposed to a super-lethal dose of 5,100 rads of high-energy rays, and we only have a few hours to live, even if we return to the surface, the results will be the same.
10:31:22 Base: (Silence…… ）
10:31:57 Mir: I’m the Commander, please let us stay on the Mir space station, which is now an outpost for human observation of X, and in the last few hours, we will do our part. We were the first astronauts to die in space, and if we have the opportunity in the future, please scatter our ashes on the soil of our homeland.
…………
(From The History of Russian Cosmonautics in the A.D. Era, Vol. 5, by Vladimir Konev, Moscow, 17th edition of the Supernova Era)
The Death Star shone in the universe for an hour and twenty-five minutes before suddenly vanishing. Now, only a huge array of radio telescopes can detect the remains of the Dead Star – a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits electromagnetic pulses with precise time intervals.
The children pressed their faces against the window panes of the classrooms and witnessed from beginning to end that it was not a sunset, this most eerie twilight. They saw that the blue of the sky gradually darkened, and soon became the blue-black of nightfall. The Death Star’s light converged, forming a twilight around it, which initially occupied half of the sky and soon narrowed to a circle around the Death Star, transitioning in color from blue-purple to white. By this time most of the sky had darkened, and scattered stars began to appear. The halo around the Death Star continued to shrink and eventually disappear completely, turning the Death Star from a radiant light source to a bright spot. When the sky is fully restored, it is still the brightest star, and then it continues to decrease in brightness, becoming an ordinary star in the Milky Way. Five minutes later, the Death Star completely disappeared into the cosmic abyss.
Seeing the lightning stop, the children ran out of the classroom, and they found themselves in a fluorescent world. Under the black night sky, everything outside: trees, houses, ground…… All glowed blue-green, as if the earth and everything on it had turned into translucent jade. And in the depths of the earth, a moon-like light source shone up, soaking its light in the jade. Glowing green clouds floated in the night sky, and flocks of birds alarmed by the Death Star flew through the sky like a flock of glowing green spirits. What shocked the children the most was that they themselves fluoresced, looking in the dark like images on a negative film, like a group of ghosts.
“I said, anything can happen……” Glasses muttered.
At this time, the lights in the classroom were turned on, and the lights of the surrounding city were also turned on, and the children realized that the power had just gone out. With the advent of the lights, the ubiquitous fluorescence disappeared. The children thought the world was back to its original state, but they soon discovered that the shocking things weren’t over yet.
There was a red light in the northeast sky, and after a while, clouds glowing with a dark red light rose in the sky in that direction, like the morning glow that had just appeared.
“It’s really dawn this time!”
“Nonsense, it’s not eleven o’clock yet!”
The red cloud floated mightily, and soon covered half of the night sky. That’s when the children realized that the cloud itself was glowing. When the front edge of the red cloud floated to the middle of the sky, they saw that it was composed of huge bands of light, like countless red curtains hanging from space, slowly twisting and changing.
“It’s the Northern Lights!” There are children shouting.
The aurora soon filled the sky. For the next week, the night sky around the world was filled with red bands of light.
A week later, when the aurora disappeared completely and the brilliant starry sky reappeared, the last and most magnificent movement of the cosmic symphony played by the supernova appeared: a glowing nebula appeared at the same location where the Death Star appeared a few days earlier! This is the dust left behind after a supernova explosion, which is excited by high-energy electrical pulses from the remnants of a dead star, causing it to emit synchrotron accelerating radiation at visible wavelengths. That’s why humans can see it. The nebula is slowly growing, and now has a visible area in the sky equivalent to two full moons. This large nebula is radial and shaped like a rose, and it is later known as the Rose Nebula. The rose nebula emitted a solemn and mysterious blue light in the sky, and when this light hits the earth, it becomes as silver as the moonlight, and as bright as the full moon, illuminating every detail of the earth and making the sea of lights of the city much darker.
From then on, the Rose Nebula will shine on the history of mankind until the destruction or immortality of the species that ruled the Earth after the dinosaurs.