JON CULSHAW

Jon’s off-world travelogue continues.

My destination this month is a most interesting, T-Tauri star named CVSO 30, which sounds like a form you’d find in a Post Office. The star of this system is 0.4 solar masses and very young – a stellar toddler just a mere 2.5 million years old. This extraordinarily fresh star takes its place in the constellation of Orion, 1,200 lightyears away.

There are two known worlds within this system, each as contrasting and extreme as it’s possible to be. My ship, the Perihelion, will make only a brief flypast of the first planet, CVSO 30b, a great gas giant at five Jovian masses. Its extremely close proximity to the parent star of 1.2 million km means it completes a single orbit in a cosmic nano-blink of time – only 11 hours. The thought of this is utterly dizzying, though it does make for an interesting transit observation through my aluminised Mylar viewers. The planet slices through its orbital path like a Winter Olympics athlete on a luge.

Setting the Perihelion on a course much further from the star, I’m going to take a look at the other world we know in this system. Orbiting at an incredibly remote distance of 660 astronomical units from its star is CVSO 30c. In a tantalising step towards visualising interstellar objects, astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to obtain a direct image of this exoplanet. At 4.7 times the mass of Jupiter this is a mighty planet cloaked in a dim, bleak, dark environment.

It’s tough to contemplate the 27,000 years CVSO 30c takes to complete a single orbit – this planet has the chilling sense of time locked into perpetual stillness. The light from the distant star is minimal, offering scant reassurance; the view is like a blacked-out bedroom at 3am, lit only by the tiny LED on a rechargeable shaver.

The thought of this planet’s year lasting 27,000 of our own is rather a stretch for me to imagine. When this world was last in its present position, the Earth was in the grip of its most recent ice age: mammoths, cave bears and Neanderthals occupied the deep-chilled lands. It feels like another form of ice age here, passing over CVSO 30c – a darker, stony, silent ice age with an eerie, almost maddening stillness.

Turning away from the dim flicker of the home star, the blackness of the sky allows a myriad unfamiliar constellations to zing into view with unpolluted magnificence. It’s novel to consider that Orion isn’t visible due to the fact we’re in it. But that silence and stillness is like an unnerving void, and causes an unpleasant feeling the longer I remain in this location. It’s almost a lonely vision of hell, such is the sense of condemned detachment and emptiness.

Time to hope the Perihelion keeps running and completes the 1,200 lightyear journey back to Earth! The urge to return home is strong on this trip.