EX PLANET EXCURSIONS
A colossal blue hypergiant has a seriously damaging effect on Jon’s ship
F uelled by an unusually strong impulse to witness a cosmic display almost beyond imagination, I’m piloting my ship, The Perihelion, to the blue hypergiant HD 37974, an object of staggering incandescence 170,000 lightyears away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The view of the Milky Way is utterly jaw-dropping from the outside, here in this satellite galaxy. It’s like images of our Galaxy shimmering over the deserts of Earth at night, but much more defined and immensely brighter: the light level of 70 full Moons across an Earth night sky.
Steering the ship closer to star HD 37974 brings into focus a remarkable debris disc of matter that loops so widely around it. The star and debris disc together have the profound and surreal appearance of a massively upscaled version of Saturn. But in place of a gas giant planet, there’s a colossal, blue hypergiant star, 70 times the mass of the Sun and 1.4 million times as luminous. And in place of Saturn’s ring system, there’s a ring of material sufficient in volume to create an entire planetary system – if the conditions of stellar ferocity could ever allow such settlement to occur.
As the Milky Way’s shimmering garlands of light accent the background of this ‘Saturn Star’, I can’t help but recall some classic lines from the great Les Dawson: “As I gazed up to observe the majesty of the night sky, a myriad points of light as the stars glistened just like diamonds cast across black velvet. With Jupiter, Mars and Saturn festooned in their orbital majesty, the rising crescent Moon ascended from the horizon like an ambered chariot. As I gazed up to observe this magical sight, I thought to myself, I really must put a roof on this lavatory.”
But I mustn’t let my mind wander in an environment so potentially dangerous as this is. The Perihelion’s heat and radiation shields and gravity regulators are working fine but I must maintain maximum attention and vigilance.
Observing this debris disc brings a rather sad feeling that the violence of the parent star means no formation of any planets and moons could ever take place. The young, formative exoplanet recently discovered around the star PDS 70 by ESA’s VLT is a kind of planet formation that could never take place here!
It’s time I was off. I attempt to leave but the ship is straining. It can only be that remaining too long so recklessly close to the Saturn Star has caused a destructive systems failure in my ship. While musing over Les Dawson I was oblivious to the cataclysmic damage being absorbed by my brave Perihelion, the situation exacerbated by my previous misadventure in the trinary system in Centaurus.
Without any ability to program a specific departure destination, my priority must be to evacuate from this system immediately, and blindly. The interstellar equivalent of triggering the ejector seat and being jettisoned off to who knows where.