Seventy years ago - and damn, but is it going to take me a while to get used to 1940 being "seventy years ago" now - neither writers nor readers batted an eye at the prospect of canals on Mars, jungles on Venus, or intelligent species scattered across the solar system. It wasn't until the latter half of the 20th century, when more sophisticated Earth-based detection systems were developed and the first interplanetary probes were launched, that Barsoom was transformed from possibility to fantasy.
Being proven wrong is an eventuality that every sf writer will face. It's an intrinsic fact of the genre; we're none of us clairvoyants, and though some may forecast more accurately than others, what we put down in our words can't ever match the future that will eventually unfold. It's too complicated for that. What sf writers can do, however, is try to minimize this as much as possible.
Right now, the stories I've got in the working or planning stages are relatively near future pieces, set in the Earth-Luna system in the late 2070s. For a while I've had plans to go further afield once I develop the setting, to do 22nd-century stories where distant interplanetary and even interstellar journeys become possible. The stars beyond Sol have been ciphers for all of human history - for almost all of the time that science fiction has been written, Earth's intrepid explorers might find anything under other suns.
This decade might see this change a bit. NASA's Kepler telescope, launched last March on a multi-year mission to discover strange new worlds, has been hard at work, and on Monday details were released of the five new exoplanets detected by its efforts. All five of the newfound planets are hot worlds, orbiting extremely close to their parent stars, and only one is smaller than Jupiter. Going back to the discovery of Bellerophon in 1995, many of the exoplanets so far detected have been such "Hot Jupiters." Kepler is poised to change that, with its sensitive instruments said to be capable of detecting Earth-mass planets orbiting other stars. Not only that - in the near future, telescopes may well be able to detect individual moons orbiting these gas giants. Presumably, only the exotic properties of the mass relays will prevent Kepler from detecting them as well.
While this is great news to me, as a scientifictionist it poses a problem for the immediate future. Back in 1940, spaceflight itself was widely considered a fool's dream - whether or not Mars had canals and Venus jungles, if the writers of the time were concerned about accuracy, for all they knew it might have been a hundred years until they were proven wrong or right either way. I feel like I'm in a similar place now as to when Larry Niven wrote and sold The Coldest Place in 1964, written when the leading consensus was that Mercury was tidally locked, a consensus that was only broken by radar mapping - and after The Coldest Place had been bought, but before it was published.
I ran into a similar problem while writing You Source of Tears, which will be appearing in an upcoming issue of On Spec magazine. Originally it was set around Halley's Comet, though the only artifact of this is the title itself. I changed the setting to the fictional Comet Veale for two reasons - one, because a three hundred-year orbital period was more convenient for me than Halley's seventy-six, and two, because there was the possibility that some future expedition to Halley's Comet would prove me wrong. As an sf writer, I make enough assumptions about the future already - there's no need for me to dump falsifiable predictions into the mix.
Kepler, if successful, will revolutionize our understanding of the interstellar neighborhood. In ten years, maybe we'll know that a planet of Tau Ceti or a moon of a gas giant at 55 Cancri has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water. We wouldn't be speculating blind anymore, and while we may end up just building new Barsooms, there's a certain magic in that. I'm willing to hold my pen until they make the first maps of those strange new worlds.
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Stars of Other Worlds: 55 Cancri
Every once in a while, Acts of Minor Treason takes a jaunt through subspace and hyperspace and across cosmic strings and collapsars to some strange new world, to set up a telescope and look up at the stars from a new angle.
Though I was a star nerd during my youth - I learned the Greek alphabet from Terence Dickinson's Nightwatch, and pored over its starcharts religiously even though I never mustered the gumption to actually take the telescope out for a spin - it wasn't until the 21st century that I first heard of 55 Cancri. Also known as Rho1 Cancri, 55 Cancri is a binary star in the constellation Cancer, approximately forty-one light-years away. The larger of the two stars is a G8V yellow dwarf, a bit dimmer than our own sun, and it's accompanied by a much dimmer red dwarf. From Earth, 55 Cancri A has an apparent magnitude of 5.95, just barely visible to the naked eye under ideal conditions.
The stars themselves aren't too remarkable. Binaries are, after all, one of the most common stellar arrangements in the galaxy. The 55 Cancri planetary system, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It's the largest known system beyond the solar system, with at least five planets detected in orbit of 55 Cancri A, all thought to be gas giants based on their mass. One of them, 55 Cancri f, orbits its sun in 260 days and spends its orbit entirely within the habitable zone - close enough to the sun that a hypothetical moon of the planet could sustain liquid water, which might enable an ecosphere similar to Earth's.
So, hypothetically, if there are thinking beings on a moon of 55 Cancri f - whether they're humans or otherwise - what would they see?
There'll always be the stars. Earth and 55 Cancri are close enough to share bright stars in common - Canopus is effectively just as bright when viewed from either system, and Rigel and Betelgeuse in Orion are a bit dimmer here than there. Discounting 55 Cancri B, when observing from a moon of 55 Cancri f Pollux would be the brightest star in the sky, a bit dimmer than Sirius appears on Earth.
Still, even though Sol and 55 Cancri occupy the same galactic neighborhood, perspective changes fast with only a handful of parsecs. While snooping around in its sky I found two constellations that struck my interest, constellations I've named the Broken Plough and Atalanta.
Aside from Orion, the Big Dipper is probably the single most recognizable star pattern in Earth's skies. It's known by many names by many cultures, and in the British Isles it's also called the Plough. As many of its stars move together in a cluster called the Ursa Major Moving Group, it's no surprise that from 55 Cancri they're still together in the sky. Even the pattern we're familiar with on Earth is mostly intact - if a bit distorted.
Viewed from Earth, the two brightest Big Dipper stars are Dubhe and Alioth, which share an apparent magnitude of 1.8. Although Dubhe doesn't figure into the Broken Plough as I've laid it out, Alioth is its keystone and even brighter than we see it, with an apparent magnitude of 1.22 from 55 Cancri. Alkaid, at the western end, is still brighter than any of the Big Dipper stars from Earth, and Thuban - the brightest star in Draco, and the northern polestar in ancient Egypt's heyday - at the eastern edge is only slightly dimmer than Megrez seems to us, and again is somewhat brighter than it appears from Earth.
In Greek mythology, Orion was a masterful hunter who was killed either by Artemis (who, presumably, did not like competition of Orion's caliber) or a giant scorpion and subsequently elevated to the heavens in the form of the constellation we know today. He's one of the many larger-than-life heroes that populate the myths - taken together, they're a real sausagefest, if you ask me.
Orion the constellation has such mythological significance because it's so damned obvious. Owing to its position in the sky it's visible in every part of the world, and it's anchored by some of the brightest stars in the sky. Bright patterns like that definitely attract attention.
Should there ever be humans looking up from a moon of 55 Cancri f, they might not take long to notice a particular arrangement of stars that reminds them of what they left behind.
In Greek mythology, Atalanta was also a hunter, and one of the few non-goddess females in that canon. The correspondence isn't exact, but haunting nevertheless. Antares, at her right foot, is Atalanta's brightest star, with Graffias (Beta Scorpii) her head while Zubenelgenubi and Sigma Scorpii form her belt. Here, Atalanta comprises stars from no less than three Earth constellations - while the majority are in Scorpius from Earth's perspective, Zubenelgenubi is the brightest star in Libra, and Atalanta's left foot is formed by Gamma Virginis, in Virgo.
This correspondence is particularly interesting because none of the familiar stars of Orion are involved in it. Still, the human brain is the most sophisticated finder of patterns in the static that we have, and it's no suprise that on distant worlds we might look up to see something that, while not the same, remains vaguely familiar - enough to put one at ease, remembering home.
What of home, by the by? Forty-one light-years is hardly enough to make a star like ours invisible. Sol's above the limits of vision from 55 Cancri, but not by much - it would have an apparent magnitude of 5.32, best viewed with binoculars.
As previously, all glory goes to Celestia for making these views possible without a hell of a lot of painful mathematics on my end.
Further Stars of Other Worlds
Though I was a star nerd during my youth - I learned the Greek alphabet from Terence Dickinson's Nightwatch, and pored over its starcharts religiously even though I never mustered the gumption to actually take the telescope out for a spin - it wasn't until the 21st century that I first heard of 55 Cancri. Also known as Rho1 Cancri, 55 Cancri is a binary star in the constellation Cancer, approximately forty-one light-years away. The larger of the two stars is a G8V yellow dwarf, a bit dimmer than our own sun, and it's accompanied by a much dimmer red dwarf. From Earth, 55 Cancri A has an apparent magnitude of 5.95, just barely visible to the naked eye under ideal conditions.
The stars themselves aren't too remarkable. Binaries are, after all, one of the most common stellar arrangements in the galaxy. The 55 Cancri planetary system, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It's the largest known system beyond the solar system, with at least five planets detected in orbit of 55 Cancri A, all thought to be gas giants based on their mass. One of them, 55 Cancri f, orbits its sun in 260 days and spends its orbit entirely within the habitable zone - close enough to the sun that a hypothetical moon of the planet could sustain liquid water, which might enable an ecosphere similar to Earth's.
So, hypothetically, if there are thinking beings on a moon of 55 Cancri f - whether they're humans or otherwise - what would they see?
There'll always be the stars. Earth and 55 Cancri are close enough to share bright stars in common - Canopus is effectively just as bright when viewed from either system, and Rigel and Betelgeuse in Orion are a bit dimmer here than there. Discounting 55 Cancri B, when observing from a moon of 55 Cancri f Pollux would be the brightest star in the sky, a bit dimmer than Sirius appears on Earth.
Still, even though Sol and 55 Cancri occupy the same galactic neighborhood, perspective changes fast with only a handful of parsecs. While snooping around in its sky I found two constellations that struck my interest, constellations I've named the Broken Plough and Atalanta.
The Broken Plough
Aside from Orion, the Big Dipper is probably the single most recognizable star pattern in Earth's skies. It's known by many names by many cultures, and in the British Isles it's also called the Plough. As many of its stars move together in a cluster called the Ursa Major Moving Group, it's no surprise that from 55 Cancri they're still together in the sky. Even the pattern we're familiar with on Earth is mostly intact - if a bit distorted.
Viewed from Earth, the two brightest Big Dipper stars are Dubhe and Alioth, which share an apparent magnitude of 1.8. Although Dubhe doesn't figure into the Broken Plough as I've laid it out, Alioth is its keystone and even brighter than we see it, with an apparent magnitude of 1.22 from 55 Cancri. Alkaid, at the western end, is still brighter than any of the Big Dipper stars from Earth, and Thuban - the brightest star in Draco, and the northern polestar in ancient Egypt's heyday - at the eastern edge is only slightly dimmer than Megrez seems to us, and again is somewhat brighter than it appears from Earth.
Atalanta
In Greek mythology, Orion was a masterful hunter who was killed either by Artemis (who, presumably, did not like competition of Orion's caliber) or a giant scorpion and subsequently elevated to the heavens in the form of the constellation we know today. He's one of the many larger-than-life heroes that populate the myths - taken together, they're a real sausagefest, if you ask me.
Orion the constellation has such mythological significance because it's so damned obvious. Owing to its position in the sky it's visible in every part of the world, and it's anchored by some of the brightest stars in the sky. Bright patterns like that definitely attract attention.
Should there ever be humans looking up from a moon of 55 Cancri f, they might not take long to notice a particular arrangement of stars that reminds them of what they left behind.
In Greek mythology, Atalanta was also a hunter, and one of the few non-goddess females in that canon. The correspondence isn't exact, but haunting nevertheless. Antares, at her right foot, is Atalanta's brightest star, with Graffias (Beta Scorpii) her head while Zubenelgenubi and Sigma Scorpii form her belt. Here, Atalanta comprises stars from no less than three Earth constellations - while the majority are in Scorpius from Earth's perspective, Zubenelgenubi is the brightest star in Libra, and Atalanta's left foot is formed by Gamma Virginis, in Virgo.
This correspondence is particularly interesting because none of the familiar stars of Orion are involved in it. Still, the human brain is the most sophisticated finder of patterns in the static that we have, and it's no suprise that on distant worlds we might look up to see something that, while not the same, remains vaguely familiar - enough to put one at ease, remembering home.
What of home, by the by? Forty-one light-years is hardly enough to make a star like ours invisible. Sol's above the limits of vision from 55 Cancri, but not by much - it would have an apparent magnitude of 5.32, best viewed with binoculars.
As previously, all glory goes to Celestia for making these views possible without a hell of a lot of painful mathematics on my end.
Further Stars of Other Worlds
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