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

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,