View of a dying world - chapter 1

Helena Maria came off her shift at VLT. They had been monitoring the same objekt all night. Betelgeuse, the red giant, a thousand times larger than Sol, or at least it used to be. The mass was still about twenty times that of Earths sun. Its volume could fit about a billion ordinary sunlike stars within it. Yet Betelgeuse was a dying world. It had been known for some time now. The estimate was that the ball of gas would say its last farewells with quite a big bang somewhere between now and the beginning of the next millennia. It had been shrinking about twenty percent since the tracking started in the early nineties and showed no sign of stopping. While it was laying there on its dying bed it spewed out long trails of gas in the surrounding night. More than one and and a half solar mass had already left the star in this way.

These days you could actually see these trails on photographs, especially those taken by the staff at VLT. It had become their speciallity. With tecniques developed during the last thirty years or so you would catch detailed pictures of the titan. One of few that allowed it. It was all about size. Most other stars were still no more than points of light in the night. But with Betelgeuse astronomy had recently celebrated some victories. The past years Helena Maria and her team had taken pictures as sharp as those of the sun, showing sunspots and solar prominences in breathtaking detail, as media usually put it. And well, it wasn’t her team really, she was just a part of it. Still, she had some skill. And with their work the star had become a close friend in the minds of the people of Sol.

Betelgeuse was about to die young. It had been around less than ten million years and it would end its path well before its tenth birthday. A timespan for a stellar life that seemed like a single breath compared to Sol. Somehow this became a saddening thought for Helena. When you had worked with one single object for so long, almost every astronomer made a habit of seeing them as living entities. And of course they already had names. The undisputable sign of an individual. So you could say that nature had put it there, the premature feeling of loss, for a freind that was about to raise sails on the horizon.

Betelgeuse is a bright red titanic star at the shoulder of Orion. The suns burning red inferno dominates the neighbouring dark of space. Yet its ending will light up the skies of Earth, and the last lights will outshine that of her companion Luna. And when it is all over, It may be so that only a black massive nothing floats in the place where it once was. Pulling the surrounding dark closer to home.