The Orthogonal Galaxy (21 page)

“
Which way do we go? We
don’t really know which way it originated? Nor do we really know
its heading. We only know how far it is from Mars,” Joram
responded.

“
Well, we can figure out
its heading if we get one or two more location points. Can we
measure it against any other planets?” Kath asked. “If we can get
some triangulated data, we should be able to calculate its distance
to other planets via parallax.”

Parallax is exactly what
astronomers used to calculate its distance from Mars. By collecting
visual data from two different observatories, at extreme latitudes,
they could see the relative difference in the two images. In an
image shot from a North American observatory, the beam would appear
to be just South of the Martian equator. The opposite would be the
case for a South American observatory. Since Mars is relatively
close enough to Earth to perform just such a calculation,
scientists were able to observe that the beam passed by Mars at a
distance of just 12,500 miles. This allowed astronomers to
calculate that its distance from Earth was over 100 times as much
at about 1.4 million miles.

Earth-based parallax—using
points on opposite sides of the Earth—worked very well for finding
distances when the measurement was in the inner Solar System. But
such calculations would be more difficult when trying to measure
the distance of the beam from, say, Neptune, or Jupiter. Instead,
the team would need to use a point farther away from
Earth.

As the team had mentioned
this point, Reyd suggested, “The Kepler3 telescope! A moon-orbiting
telescope should enhance our parallax, don’t you think?”

“
Um… we don’t exactly have
access to Kepler3,” pointed out Kath.

“
Actually, we sort of do!”
said Reyd. This piqued Kath and Joram’s curiosity as they shot a
quick glance at each other. “Zimmer has access to the Kepler3
through his Parallel Earth team. I actually know a couple of the
team members. If I explain our situation, I think we can get some
help from the team.”

“
Well, giddyup!” Kath said
as she slapped Reyd on the back.

With that, Reyd dialed his
cell phone and engaged in a conversation with a fellow graduate
student. Kath and Joram strained to follow at least half of the
conversation. Within a couple of phone calls, and a few minutes of
precious observatory time, Reyd hung up his phone and gave a thumbs
up.

“
Keelor Jefferies is gonna
call me back in about 10 minutes. He’s briefing the current Kepler3
astronomers. What we need to find are planets in the vicinity of
the beam.”

Reyd sat down at the main
control terminal and dialed up the database on the Solar System.
Within one minute he had a space map depicting the current
locations of all of the planets.

“
Boy, not too many are in
good position. They’re either on the other side of the Sun, or
they’re simply not close enough to the trajectory.”

“
Yeah, we’re looking for a
line like this,” Joram indicated as he drew an invisible line on
the monitor with a pencil he found on the console.

“
Could Uranus work?” Kath
said. “A bit far, but maybe we can get an image with the beam and
Uranus together. I’m thinking that Saturn is a better choice, but
it would be nice to have a third point along the line, so we can
convince ourselves that we have the line correctly
calculated.”

“
What about some dwarf
planets, Reyd?” asked Joram.

“
Good question. Let me
dial those into this map.”

As a handful of the larger
dwarf planets appeared on the map, Joram pointed to a promising
candidate. “Eris! Right there!”

“
Good call, Jor!” Reyd
congratulated. “I like the fact that we can find a point farther
out in the solar system, too, as that will give us two pretty
distant points to more accurately project the line. Hey, wasn’t
Eris discovered here as well?”

“
Yeah, I think you’re
right,” said Kath. “That’s kind of cool... using Eris to help us
with another important discovery right here at Palomar.”

“
Let’s get this thing
pointed at Eris,” Reyd said as he stood and proceeded towards the
telescope platform. Joram and Kath followed, as both were eager to
see and learn the controls of the telescope. Reyd was the only
member of the team to have previously been trained by Zimmer on the
telescope controls.

Within a few minutes, Reyd
had the coordinates dialed into the telescope, and it whizzed to
its new location.

“
Joram, do you remember
enough of the console to be able to feed back the quality of the
image to me?”

“
I think so.”

Joram descended from the
telescope platform, and Kath followed behind as Reyd’s cell phone
rang.

“
Keelor! Thanks for
calling back… yeah… point that thing at Eris, would you… be sure to
grab the exact coordinates from Palomar-26. They’re currently
dialed in exactly where we want, so you should be able to get them
from the intranet… We’ll also need an image on Saturn… Just give us
something with the beam, we can adjust the zoom of the image to
overlay with ours later… Yeah, I’ll bring up Kepler live on the
monitor in just a moment… Hey, thanks man… this is really going to
help us move this effort forward… sure… I’ll give you a call
tomorrow and let you know… Yeah, you too.”

When Reyd hung up, Joram
announced, “Looks good, Reyd, but we can zoom in a little to get a
better calculation from the image.”

“
Sure thing… how’s that?”
Reyd asked.

“
Great. Come take a look.”
Joram responded. “We got really lucky with Eris, because it has
such an eccentric orbit.”

“
How so?” asked
Kath.

“
It’s way out of the plane
of the solar system, but it’s close to intercepting the plane right
now, and the positioning couldn’t be better to measure a second
point along the line.”

Reyd rolled up his sleeve,
and looked at his watch. 10:49 PM. There was still plenty of time
in the evening for making some observations and calculations. For a
couple of hours the students pointed the telescope at Eris and
Saturn respectively, collecting images, comparing them to Kepler3,
situated nearly a quarter million miles from Earth. With scientific
calculators, computers, and plain old pencil and paper, the
students worked out the various calculations based on parallax
between Palomar-26 and Kepler3.

“
Ok, there’s our line!”
said Reyd after looking at his watch. “2:12 AM! Where does the time
go?”

He stood up and walked
away from the console with both hands behind his neck, working out
some tightness in his neck and shoulders. He looked back to see
Joram huddled over the console, while Kath watched intently. She
knew Joram Anders
well
enough to know that he was concerned with
something.

“
I think we need to rework
these numbers,” he announced.

“
What do you mean?” asked
Reyd. “We got three points, and they come darn near to as straight
of a line as can be expected.”

“
But it’s not perfectly
straight,” Joram answered.

“
Well, of course not…
there will be some error in measurement, and perhaps some round-off
error in our calculations.” Reyd returned to the console, agitated
at his colleague’s perfectionism.

A look of deep intent and
concern clouded Joram’s expression. He drew his lips into a tight
line before blurting out, “Look, guys. Our so-called line bends in
towards Saturn. Either we’ve calculated the distance to Saturn too
close, or the distance to Eris too far.”

“
Or,” Reyd suggested, “we
don’t have a valid measurement for the distance to
Mars.”

“
I think Mars is our
reference point.” Joram shook his head. “It should be the one we
can get closest too. Besides, several different teams of
professional astronomers all agree on the number. We’re just a trio
of grad students. I’m guessing we’re more likely to be wrong. Let’s
just rework the numbers.”

“
Joram, that’ll take
another hour!”

“
It’ll be an hour well
spent.”

Reyd disagreed, especially
when he looked at his watch at 3:04 AM when a fresh stab at the
calculations provided effectively the same exact
results.

“
We need to go back to the
drawing board and grab fresh images. Perhaps we botched the time or
coordinates of one of our shots.” Noticing that Reyd was displeased
with this suggestion, he continued. “I’m sorry, Reyd. I just think
that if we can’t nail this line exactly down, then when we trace it
back to find its source, the margin of error is going to cause us
to miss the source of the beam altogether.”

“
Ok, we still have
tomorrow night to start our trace,” Reyd agreed.

Kath jumped in. “I agree
with Joram. Besides, this is our research project, gentlemen. We’re
not just in this for the weekend, but for the long haul. Let’s not
forget that it could take an appreciable amount of our graduate
education to solve this puzzle. We just need to be patient and
careful with our work.”

With a fresh set of
images, and a clean slate for calculations, the team ended up with
yet the same results.

“
I can’t believe this,”
said Reyd. “It’s 5:15, and we’re no farther than we were hours ago.
Well, now we’re running out of nighttime to do anymore data
collection for today.”

Joram didn’t hear Reyd’s
tirade, but instead continued to focus on the data. Just as Reyd
was about to storm out of the observatory, Joram called. “Reyd!
Kath! I think I know what’s happening!”

“
Whatcha got, Joram?” Kath
was the first by his side.

“
It looks very close to a
line, because it is very close to a line, but it’s really an arc—an
orbital arc.”

“
An orbit!” exclaimed Reyd
in disbelief. With a deprecating smile on his face, he asked
skeptically. “What exactly would it be orbiting, Joram?”

Joram looked up at his
colleagues. “It’s orbiting the Milky Way—in other words, it is
orbiting our very own galactic core. It’s an orbital object, you
guys!”

“
Explain,” replied Reyd
skeptically.

Joram retraced his
calculations with his partners. “Our solar system is 26000 light
years away from the galactic core, right? That’s a circumference
greater than 10
¹⁰
Astronomical Units. The distance from Mars to
Eris is about 100 AUs, so we’re talking a ratio of 1 to
10
⁸
.
Now, on my calculator, if I divide 360 by
10
⁸
,
and then multiply by 60 arc minutes and follow that with 60 arc
seconds and then by 1000 for milliarcseconds. We’re looking at a
mere milliarcsecond. That small of an arc is always going to look
like a line, but the deviation that I had pointed out matches
perfectly with the arc that I just described.”

“
So you think this thing
is orbiting the galaxy?” Reyd wrinkled his brow as he let the
concept settle.

“
Yes.” Joram affirmed.
“Definitely!”

Both heard a suppressed
sob from behind them and turned to see a horrified Kath staggering
backwards and growing very pale. Joram jumped out of his seat and
raced to her and braced her by wrapping his arm around her
waist.

“
Kath, you’re not feeling
well. What’s wrong?” Joram asked as Reyd arrived with a
chair.

“
Sit down, Kath,”
instructed Reyd.

Her gaze was fixed towards
the console, but the blankness of her expression was clear that she
was focusing on some point much farther away… perhaps on the yellow
beam itself.

Shaking her head
vigorously, she came back to her senses. “Guys, listen… this thing
is growing brighter, isn’t it?”

“
Well… yes… we do know
that,” Reyd answered.

“
Don’t you see? Maybe it’s
not actually orbiting the galaxy. Maybe it’s emanating away from
the galactic core. It’s… it’s like a ripple. Throw a pebble in a
pond, and the ripple continues outward, right?”

“
Great point, Kath!” Joram
said. “All this time, we were assuming that it was a trail of some
sort, but maybe it is some light coming from the center of the
galaxy.”

“
Not just light, Joram!
It’s carrying some sort of annihilating radiation with it.
Something powerful enough to obliterate Camp Mars.”

“
Not so, Kath.” Joram
argued. “The beam is on the inside of Mars with respect to the
galactic core.”

“
Joram… that’s just the
visible ripple. There must be another invisible ripple ahead of it
which is carrying the destructive force.” She looked up at the two
men, each more concerned about her well-being than a beam of
emanating radiation. She propelled herself out of the chair and
raced to the monitors where a smattering of the evening’s images
were still available, each showing the glow of a yellow
streak.

“
Guys, listen to me! You
don’t get it, do you? That thing is heading… towards…
Earth!”

Now it was the men’s turn
to grow pale.