Today the stars look very different.
Hi, my name is Harry and I study space. I think I may have just found something very important, but I doubt I'm the only one. No doubt that a lot of scientists are thinking the same thing right now. Check it out for yourself if you don't believe me. Just go outside when it gets dark. Unless you're a trained observer with a star chart nearby, you probably won't notice anything odd.
It seems like a long time ago, but my part in all of this just began a few hours ago. In the telescope at my university, I was measuring the cosmic background radiation when I saw something strange on one of the screens. Some software was looking at a part of the sky, and it was probably one of my coworkers who start the process. The signal dropped all of a sudden. My eyes might not have seen anything at all if I hadn't looked at the screen at just the right time.
While the signal didn't go away completely, it did quickly and sharply lose strength. The images in the digital binoculars were now reading 0s instead of 1s where they were reading 1s before. In simple words, some of the stars had gone dark. I looked all over the building and the break room for the person who worked with the data. I was by myself, though.
I wasn't really interested in it at this point. I went up to the roof to make some simple observations while my own data was still being put together and because the University's security stopped my favorite online card game. Being an astrophysicist instead of an astronomer means I look at computers a lot more than I do at the stars. But I remembered some of my college classes and cleaned off the optical telescope on the roof. It took me a while to figure out which part of the sky had lost the signal.
I thought I had found it, but it wasn't anything special, and I wasn't sure if anything was wrong. I gave up right then and there. Since I still had some time while my data was being put together, I chose to look up at the sky and feel nostalgic. I looked up at my favorite constellations, or at least the ones I could remember. The first thing I did was find Polaris, the star that had been in a nearly perfect position to point people north for hundreds of years because of axial precession. I looked into Castor and Pollux, the Gemini twins. They were brothers to Helen of Troy and were the model for the first two-person space trips in the 1960s. Then I looked at Orion, which is one of the first stars that a new scientist will notice. I used a method I learned a long time ago to draw the hunter's shape. A strangely orange star called Betelgeuse was on Orion's left shoulder. She was on his other shoulder. Orion's right foot was...not there. I knew that this was meant to be Rigel, a faraway supergiant star with a lot of energy.
It was nowhere to be found.
Something even stranger was Orion's belt, that famous line of stars. It didn't look quite right either. As I looked at the stars, I felt confused and wished I had remembered more of what I had learned about astronomy in college. I looked for the biggest stars that I could see from where I was on the globe. It looked like everything was okay. They had Capella there. Sirius, also known as the Dog Star, was very bright. Then I saw that Canis Major, the constellation that has Sirius in it, was missing some parts. The dog didn't have a tail!
I had no idea what star it was, so I ran downstairs, past the lab where my data was probably ready, to a classroom that wasn't locked. I took a book off the shelf and began to skim it. It took me a while to find it. Aludra, a faraway star known for being stable and useful as a standard light, was the star that was missing. I felt happy for a short time, but I didn't know what it all meant.
There isn't any Rigel or Aldura in the sky, and something seems off. I had to get more info.
I took some more things from the classroom and meant to return them, but I just now realized I forgot. Well, whatever.
I ran back up to the roof and started looking over what I had seen with the right tools. I had seen that Rigel and Aludra were missing from the list of stars. Betelgeuse, Capella, and Polaris, on the other hand, were all there and could be found. It took a while, but I finally saw a pattern: the stars that weren't there were farther away than the ones that were. Even though Betelgeuse and Rigel are both parts of Orion, they are very far away, more than 300 light years.
I looked at the night sky in a planned way for the rest of the evening. I tried my hardest, but there was a whole hemisphere between me and half of the stars I could see. It turned out that my first idea was right: the stars that were the farthest from Earth were missing.
But I made my observations better. I used the optical telescope and my simple star charts to find a lot of stars that were missing. I went back to the lab with these numbers and began making a computer model. I used a 3D galaxy map to draw the stars that were missing.
That's when I saw it: none of the data points were within a certain range. There was a sphere of stars that was almost perfect, and everything else had just disappeared. All the stars that could be seen were surrounded by a space between the stars that was hundreds of light years wide.
It's been impossible for me to stop coming up with crazy ideas to explain what I found since then. Were all of the stars gone? There's no way they could have gone nova. It was something we would have seen. That huge amount of energy probably would have killed the Earth. A part of the galaxy might have been stuck in a big sphere. Even though it made sense, it was crazy. How could that happen? Who would be able to do it? Why is that? Is the sphere a sign of understanding, or is it just a natural shape? It's possible that we were no longer in the Milky Way. Maybe our little sphere of stars was taken out of the galaxy and shifted somewhere else. But that wasn't possible either.
The only reason I took the pills was to help me sleep. If I wake up in the morning, I'm sure this knowledge will be all over the science world. But before I go to sleep, I have a few things to leave you with.
Don't be naive and think that the sphere, or whatever it is, that all the stars have gone out of is centered on Earth. The orb I drew shows that Earth is inside it, but not in the middle. Based on the information I have, the exact center is a normal G-class star a few hundred light-years from Earth that I only learned about by looking through list of stars. This doesn't make sense to me.
Finally, and this may be the scariest thought I've had all night: whatever happened over 700 years ago to make the stars go dark is due to how fast light moves and how big the sphere is.
