The Star Eaters

It remained frozen in a state of suspended animation for centuries. It traveled vast distances from a place it didn’t know existed. No memories reside in its primitive brain. It’s the perfect space traveler, oblivious of where it has been, how long it’s been traveling and where it was going. Wrapped securely in a thick cocoon of dark matter, it glided along the frictionless fabric of interstellar space, ceaselessly pulled by the flux of gravitational forces until it could find a suitable place to fulfill its destiny, its reason for being. Its lineage is long, almost as long as the universe is old. The species was probably the oldest life form in the universe, but it had no understanding of that fact. In its immature stage, it spent over one hundred years feeding on the abundant baryonic matter deep within the gravity well in which it was born. Then, as if coordinated by some subconscious signal, it and all of its hundreds of siblings encased themselves in a dark matter crystalis, excreted from their protective outer covering, and then entered a long inanimate hibernation.

The Cornell University campus was a hubbub of activity. An uncharacteristically warm early spring day in Ithaca attracted many of the students and staff to the outdoors. The dogwoods were just beginning to bloom after a long cold and snowy winter. Gerry Morgan, however, could not take advantage of the balmy weather. She had to make her 2:30 allotted time slot on one of Cornell’s supercomputers. She reviewed in her mind the procedure she would use to get the most of her one-hour allocation as she jogged across campus to the Space Science Building. First, she would need to upload the raw data she brought with her on the 30 optical disks tucked away in her backpack. The disks contained five years of accumulated data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known by its acronym SOHO. SOHO contained an instrument pack that measured and recorded the characteristics of the solar wind. Gerry hoped to use these data to validate her models for predicting the frequency and intensity of solar storms. A model such as this would be useful for protecting orbiting satellites, the space shuttles and the international space station. She would then need to run a correlation of the particulate and energy data against her models in order to test their reliability for projecting solar weather activity over the longer term.

Gerry was a petit 23 year old with shortly cropped brown hair and a generally unassuming personality. Her stature and mannerisms belied her emence intelect. She was born and raised in Vancouver B.C. and had been awed, since childhood, by the brilliant displays of the Aurora Borealis. When she learned that those shows of dancing filaments of multicolored lights in the autumn sky were caused by particles emitted by the far away sun interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, she knew she needed to learn more. This desire led her to Cornell where she was a dissertation away from earning her Ph.D. in astrophysics.

She reached the Space Science Building and flew down the stairs to the basement level where the supercomputer was housed. She signed in and received the daily password from the student manning the front desk. After initiating her assigned terminal, she immediately uploaded the disks. She was ready to test her models after about a half-hour of data manipulation . Gerry spent most of the past year working out these models with the help of her advisor and mentor Dr. Roger Wilcox, nicknamed Roger Wilco because of his expertise in radio astronomy.

Gerry ran multiple correlation studies against three of her most promising models, but to her dismay, she found no strong relationships. In fact, the strongest correlation was actually negative, however, even that was too weak. There seemed to be higher particulate density in the solar wind than her models would have predicted. Gerry became suddenly depressed. The models worked well when tested against some short-term data she ran about a month ago. There was no reason why they should not have held up using the longer-term material. She then decided to run her models against isolated time fragments of six months. When she did, the models correlated, as she had expected them to. She was able to predict the relative solar energetic particle densities over a course of a few months. They even held up well over period of a year or two but began to degenerate at around a three-year threshold. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough data to test much beyond that limit. She would have to wait for more to be collected from the SOHO satellite before she could refine her models, but she was running out of time. She felt compelled to finish her dissertation by the autumn, so that she could continue her studies as a post doc at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. There was a position waiting for her there, but it would not wait forever. However, for the time being, her focus was not on those distractions only on why her models failed in the long-term prediction.

A mathematical model that could reliably predict solar wind activity over a 2 year period was still quite useful and would certainly earn her a doctorate, but that was beside the point. Her models should have matched the entire data array. The sun was very stable and has been for millions of years. There had been no other observable or recorded change over the last 5 years, that she was aware of, that could explain the unpredictability in solar wind particulate density. It certainly was not observable when looking at the CELIAS data alone or it would have been reported. The differences only became apparent when Gerry correlated the particulate density and the x-ray analysis data against her predictive models. She could only think of two possible reasons, either the data was erroneous or her models were. As a scientist, she learned to never second guess the data. They were what they were. That meant her models must be flawed.

As the pull of the gravity well strengthened against the dark matter cocoon, the creature inside began to change. Its immature form began to mature into an adult. As a larva, most of its anatomy and physiology was dedicated to the collection and absorption of the elemental nutrients found deep within its gravity well home. Now, those organs were adapting to new functions. Sensory organs once used for taste were transforming to gravity detectors. They would be useful for directing the adult to its destination. Nodules embedded within its gut, used to absorbed and convert its food into energy, now were becoming eggs, containing the developing larva it would leave behind in its new nest. Some of the fibrous muscles, aligned longitudinally along its worm-like body, became tubular and developed openings through its thick dark matter epidermis. Enzymes were produced to breakdown some of the excess energy stores into a dense compressed gas. The gas would be excreted through these tubules to direct its movements towards its final target.

It took many years for the creature to complete its metamorphosis. All the while, it was closing in on the gravity well that began its incessant pull hundreds of years before. Cracks began to propagate in the surface of the crystalis. They quickly ran long and deep. Small fragments broke away and floated along side the speeding pupa until, in a brief climatic thrust, the fully mature adult expelled itself from it space bound capsule. The new creature looked much different than its past form. Its long supple body covering was converted to a tough carapace. It was now almost spheroid with thick long tapers on its anterior and posterior ends. The creature was the size of a small planet but it slid through the darkness of space almost invisibly. Its dark matter covering reflected none of the billions of photons that intersected its body. In fact, its evolved physiology absorbed and incorporated those photonic particles to further thicken and toughen it protective shell.

With the organism’s rebirth came a new obsession. The instinct to feed was replaced by a compulsion to procreate. Its round body was full of thousands of large eggs, each one containing a quickly developing fetus. It sniffed the cold vacuum of space and oriented its body towards the gravity well that contain the abundant nutrients that its children could eat. It released a long powerful burst of propellant and sped along sloped space, deformed by the gravity well that would be its prodigy’s new home.

Hot direct sunshine irradiated Gerry’s face as she sat alone at a sidewalk cafe table. She regretted leaving her sunglasses behind in the apartment. The sun was so strong Gerry needed to squint her eyes just to watch the people passing by. The waitress walked over to the table carrying Gerry’s double cappuccino, extra sweet, on top of a small plastic tray. Gerry let her mind wander for a moment. She was always in awe of a waiter’s ability to balance full cups of hot coffee while negotiating the maze of chairs, tables and people that crowded a restaurant. She had tried waiting tables at a bar in San Francisco her sophomore year of college. The experience was horrific. She had little problem remembering orders and to whom the drinks belonged but the physical stuff was well beyond her abilities. After she spilled about a dozen drinks on as many people the first week, she knew that wasn’t the job for her.

The waitress gingerly placed the full cup of coffee in front of Gerry without spilling a drop. Gerry looked up at the young woman and forced a smile and a barely audible “thank you”. She allowed the cup to cool for a few moments and continued her people watching. Then the flood of questions and concerns began again to invade her thoughts. Her stomach churned at the thought that she may not meet her self-imposed October deadline for her dissertation.

Gerry covered her face with her hands in exasperation. Why didn’t her models work? She spent almost every waking hour and many she should have been sleeping, working and reworking the programs’ algorisms. She had become quite expert in the complicated mathematics of chaos theory, expert enough to teach a graduate course in the subject at Cornell. Wilcox had felt she was in a unique position to apply chaos theory to a complex problem like predicting the behavior of the sun’s corona. Gerry had the intellectual ability and the motivation to be tenacious at perusing the answer. Plus, she had the resources of a well financed institute behind her with all the equipment and minds money could buy.

Gerry’s brain began to freely process what she had learned, now that there was some time and distance between her and the frustration of her failed tests. She believed since she was a little girl that failure was not failure unless you haven’t learned from the experience. What did she learn? She thought hard at the question. Her models, one in particular, projected the output of the solar wind very well. She ran a multifactor correlation between the model’s output and the observational data and found a very decent correlation. However, as she expanded the time range the relationship degenerated perceptively. This would normally be expected since there would be a greater probability of abnormalities in the observational data as the timeline expanded. Which was why she ran this test on the supercomputer. Her algorithms should have been sophisticated enough to adjust to these aberrations.

Gerry tried to recall the results through the several permutations of time intervals she ran. She had the type of mind that could calculate and retain large groups of numbers and then process them into a single graphic picture. She concentrated hard on retaining the remembered data long enough in her memory until she had completed a 3-dimensional diagram. She closed her eyes and studied the sloping shape of the image resolving in her mind. As more data was added to the developing graph, a pattern began to emerge. Gerry wasn’t sure that the pattern was accurate due to the reliance of her memory to piece it together but where there was a pattern, there should have been an underlying cause. What was surprising was that the pattern was not chaotic. It was relatively simplistic and unidirectional. Then a thought crept into Gerry’s mind, a simple thought, a terrible thought. Gerry quickly finished the now cold cappuccino, threw 3 dollars on the table and ran back towards the campus to find Dr. Wilcox.

The creature's speed increased proportionally as it approached the gravity well. Instinctively, it increased its angle to the gravity stream to optimize its descent. It plunged into the gravity well and traveled in a steep pitched spiral until it arrived at a stable convergence of opposing tidal forces that would be a suitable berthing location. The organism suddenly stilled its movements and became suspended between the divergent forces of gravitational flux. It remained in this unchanging state for a long time until suddenly a crack began to show in its dark matter shell. The crack elongated and widened until a rift formed much like an earthquake in the Earths hard crust. Then, one by one, the creature’s offspring began their escape from their parent’s carcass.

Hundreds of elongated larvae emerged through the breach. They swam away from their parent’s body oblivious to the long journey it undertook to reach the safety of this haven. Immediately, they began to feed on the rich ocean of minerals raining down upon them, generated from the high temperature and pressures present in the immense star.

Gerry sprinted across the Cornell campus. It was approaching 4:30 and the sun was beginning to creep towards the horizon. Long shadows fell upon the ground like dark corpses. The years of training in cross country running paid off, for she was able to run the mile or so distance in less than 12 minutes, even with the full pack of books strapped to her back. She burst through the glass door of the Space Science Building and double stepped it up the three flights to the Astrophysics department.

When Gerry reached the department’s offices she paused for a moment to catch her breath and then entered. Linda Murray, the department assistant, was not at her desk. Her desk was clear of clutter and the screen saver on her computer was projecting alternating photos of color enhanced images of various interstellar phenomenon. She had obviously gone for the day. Gerry rounded Linda’s desk and wound her way through the maze of hallways to her cubical. She unbuckled her knapsack and threw it onto her chair, as she stared over the cloth wall at the closed door of Wilcox’s office. She could see his silhouette against the thick scalloped glass window that ran along the right side of his door.

Wilcox was leaning back in his chair with the phone to his ear. Gerry knew him well enough to know that she likely had time to set up her data. When Wilcox was on the phone this late in the day, he was likely talking to a colleague at the ATNF observatory in Australia. Their conversations have gone on for hours. Gerry reached over and turned on her computer. If she were going to convince Wilcox that the sun was losing mass, she would need to load her data and run the analysis she already did in her head.

After Gerry uploaded the data from her supercomputer session, she began to assemble graphs of the projection of changes to the sun’s density she extrapolated from her models. The relative density of solar wind particles is influenced by the activity on the sun’s surface. Fluctuations in particulate density often run congruent to sun spot and solar flare activity. However, a consistent unidirectional change in particulate density can only be caused by a change in two things. Either the gravitational constant was changing or the sun’s mass was. The short-term data, of which her models fit very well, fell within the predicted chaotic model. When the chaotic variances were made null, a definite upward almost linear pattern of increasing solar energetic particle densities was found.

It was very subtle, no more than 6x10-2 ions/cm3 per year over the five-year range of data, but the rate of change was increasing. When Gerry ran a 50-year projection from her best performing model, it projected a density increase to 19.3 ions/cm3, more than triple the current density. The resulting increase in the radiation bombarding the Earth’s magnetosphere could irreparably change the characteristics of the Earth magnetic field and could harm all life on the planet.

As the progeny of the space creature left their parent’s body, it quickly began to decay. Its interior structures vaporized immediately upon contact with the star’s super fluid atmosphere. Within seconds all that was left was its dark matter shell floating in the star’s Radiative Zone. The larvae, after sniffing the surrounding environment, quickly dove through the violent sea of super heated gas towards the star’s core. Radiation and plasma showered their now tough dark matter skins. They were pushed and pulled by the oscillation of tidal forces that swooped through the star’s interior. Their undulating bodies incessantly propelled them through the chaotic ripples of liquid gas until they all arrived at the star’s element rich core.

There they fed on the abundant supply of baryonic matter. Their huge bodies converted much of it into the energy they needed to live and to maintain their thickening coats of dark matter. They swam through the star’s core; their mouths gaped, devouring the heavy elements that settled there from the millions of years of atomic fusion and ceaseless pressures. Then all at once they halted their feeding. After they had digested a large percentage of the core’s matter they had sensed it was time to move on. In a mass migration, the siblings radiated outward towards the cool Convective Zone. There the continuous battering of radiation, carrying energy to the star surface, acted upon their bodies to stimulate the production of a cocoon. Baryonic matter was converted to dark matter by utilizing the great energy stores they built over the years of feeding. A thick crystalis wrapped around their bloated bodies to provide a protection for the coming space trip and from the pending explosion that would send them on their way when their momentum carried their enormous mass out from the star’s interior.

The printer began to whirl and churn as it processed the last graph Gerry sent from her computer. She walked over to the adjacent cubical where the printers were kept and waited impatiently for it to finish its mundane task. When the machine spit out the graph, Gerry grabbed it up and studied it again. She had just spent the last 45 minutes crunching the data behind the graph. She had isolated the underlying solar wind density changes that caused her model to divert from its predictive path assuming no change in the sun’s mass. Then she calculated the projected change in solar mass that would have to occur to explain the increase in the particle density of the solar wind. Gerry was shocked when her extrapolated model turned from linear to expediential at about 400 years out. She pondered the numbers and shook her head. This can’t be correct. At this projected rate, the sun won’t have enough mass to hold itself together. It will go nova in about 500 years!

“Hey Gerry, what do you have there?” Dr. Wilcox asked. His head and hands peaked over the cubical wall like the character in the “Kilroy was here” drawings. His balding head added to the effect.

“Roger you got a minute? I need to discuss something with you. I think I found something when I ran my models today and I’m not sure if it’s real. I really need to bounce this off of you.”

“That’s right you tested your models on the SOHO data today. How’d it go?” asked Wilcox with obvious interest.

“It didn’t go well. I mean it went fine. I mean, I don’t really know how it went,” came Gerry’s confused reply.

Wilcox briefly disappeared behind the wall and then stepped through the cubical opening. He found a sturdy table and sat against it, folding his arms and crossing his legs. “All right let’s just take it from the beginning.”

Gerry tried to explain, as rationally as she could, the events of the afternoon. She told Wilcox of the ambiguous results of the test and of her theory about the increasing loss of solar mass.

“Did you ever think that your models just have some errors?” Wilcox interrupted. He knew he was stating the obvious but needed to assure himself that Gerry was not chasing a red herring.

“Of course I did,” Gerry responded, “That’s why I ran this.” She handed Wilcox one of the graphs she had hidden from Wilcox’s sight.

“What’s this?”

“That is a representation of the increase in solar energetic particle densities over the last five years after I null the model’s calculations. As you can see, it follows a distinct linear pattern.”

“What does this tell you Gerry?”

“Its tells me that my model is working fine. If there was an error, the delta between the model and observational would be variable not linear. There is a consistent change in the sun’s output that can’t be explained by chaotic variation.”

Wilcox studied the graph for a long moment. He rubbed one of his temples with his free index finger and pondered Gerry’s theory. “What else have you got there?” Wilcox asked pointing to Gerry’s right hand with the same finger.

“I calculated the necessary changes in the sun’s mass needed to explain the increases in particle density,” Gerry said as she handed Wilcox her second graph, “I extrapolated the changes based on my model. The mass decrease appears to remain linear for about 400 years then suddenly drops exponentially.”

“This is assuming the mass loss remains consistent right?” Wilcox asked.

“Well yes, that’s right.”

“The data you have here could be a real significant discovery,” Wilcox said waving the first graph through the air, “This extrapolation, I’d keep to myself if I were you. There is no reason to think that if the sun is losing some of its mass right now it will remain so. The sun is four and a half billion years old. Perhaps it does periodically experience mass loss on a miniscule scale. I don’t know and no one else does either. We have only been studying the physics of the sun for less than 50 years. There is a lot we don’t know about it. But I'll tell you what, I'll send this data out to John Ruggles at NASA. He’s one of the leading experts on solar radiation. You may have to drive down there to explain all this too him. If you get his interest peaked, I think you’ll have an outstanding dissertation here.”

Gerry was a little disappointed Wilcox dismissed her data extrapolation out of hand. However, she did appreciate his support for her models predictive power, otherwise he would of questioned her assumptions altogether.

Wilcox gave Gerry a silent smile and began to walk towards his office to send an e-mail to NASA. He paused for a moment then turned around to face Gerry again through the opening in the cubical. “While we’re on the subject of the sun and stars,” Wilcox said while his mind was whirling with the possibilities of Gerry’s possible discovery. “I just got off the phone with Bill Shaw at ATNF. He told me that they discovered a new nova in the neighborhood of Vela. Well not new, it happened about 300 years ago but it’s the third seen in that area in the last 25 years. He said it’s the closest one to Earth yet seen. He wants me to take a wide band shot of it with Arecibo tomorrow. All this is probably just coincidence but it is interesting.”

The star parasites, now asleep in their own dark matter cocoons, rode the increasingly violent waves of matter and energy through the dying star’s Convective Zone. The star’s core, revenged by centuries of insatiable appetites, was well below the necessary mass to keep the star together. Billions of years of equilibrium between matter loss and absorption were broken. The star could no longer maintain the temperatures and pressures necessary to sustain fusion. The siblings were in position to take advantage of the pending nova. With a final convulsive expansion, the star exploded and released its contents into the surrounding space. The remaining heavy elements at its core compressed under the immense explosive pressure, leaving behind a pitiful pulsar where a giant once stood.

The encased creatures scattered in all directions. The initial push of the supernova explosion accelerated them to near light speed. One of the pupas immediately encountered the gravitational pull of a moderately sized yellow star about 300 light years away. It approached the gavity well after its long voyage undetected, even though a technologically advanced species inhabited the third planet in the star's system. However, the newly hatch adult had no knowledge of this. Its mind focused only on obtaining the correct angle for its plunge into the stars furry where it died in a single convulsive eruption as it released its progeny to feed and grow in the star interior.

One day soon, this star will also nova after much of its core has been consumed. Then another generation will disperse into the void as their parent did centuries earlier, and repeat the cycle of life that has allowed their species to endure since the universe was born.