BAN #220: Deep short, salty meteors

[Spiral Galaxy M81 image credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona]

Microfic

A short short story

As I said in issue 208, there used to be a short story website called Ficly where you could write a story, but it was limited to 1024 alphanumeric characters, including spaces. Severely limiting length forced you to be brief, even curt. I found the limitation made me think very carefully about what I wrote, sometimes literally choosing a word with 4 letters instead of 5, even if it worked less well, to make things fit. It’s a fun and interesting exercise.

In that issue I posted one story I wrote; here’s another, more or less (well, more; I’ll explain after).

Deep

The flash was barely noticeable, seen obliquely. Ancient reflexes acted; I whipped my arms to turn myself. Maybe I did. I couldn’t perceive it. The light was gone before I could react, and all was black once again.

I sighed in mind if not in practice. Another black hole evaporating catastrophically as it reached the Hawking limit. That last made one billion exactly. Hurray.

It must’ve been a supermassive one in the core of some long-dead galaxy; they’re all that’s left now. Besides me of course. The last one blew up over 10^92 years ago.

Time is long. As I well knew.

I swore in a trillion languages, taking my time, stretching out each syllable in my head, letting each last a millennium. Then I did it again, in reverse.

I remember everything. I was an idiot.

Sure, I’ll make a deal, I said. I’ll be specific, I said. No aging. No insanity. My memory will be perfect. Nothing will be able to hurt or kill me.

Nothing.

Idiot. Even the Devil himself must have long ago disintegrated into sub-subatomic dust. All that’s left is me. And the black holes.

Idiot.

* * *

When I was in high school I liked thinking about truly deep time, like well after the stars had all gone out. I also loved stories about immortality, but thought they never really plumbed the idea of what it truly meant: To live so long that a trillion years was like the flutter of a mosquito’s wing. Long enough that even black holes evaporate.

I had the picture of an immortal person floating in perfectly black space a googol years from now, not even knowing if they were spinning or not. But every attempt at writing the story confounded me. It never worked. Then, decades later, I decided to try the idea in the severely curtailed Ficly format, and it just bloomed into existence. I realized I was trying to flesh the story out too much, give too much back story. It doesn’t need it. The version above is a few words longer than what I put in Ficly, because for various reasons I think it needed a couple of small tweaks. I have a much longer version I wrote with some more details and such, clocking in around 2600 words, and it’s OK. Maybe I’ll post it here sometime. But for some reason, the terseness and brevity make this one punch a little harder, I think.

Astro Tidbit

A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news that may be too short for the blog, too long for Twitter, but just right (and cool enough to talk about) for here.

I love it when several things I’ve written about in the past come together. In this case, the story is a little salty.

HAHAHA. Ha. Because it’s about sodium. See? Is it funny or Na?

Anyway. In March 2020 I wrote an article about a bright fireball that burned up over Spain. It was caught on several cameras set up to detect bright meteors, and how they could take real-time spectra of the meteors, thereby measuring the elements in them. This one had a strong showing of sodium in its spectrum… but I was careful to note that sodium glows strongly at low temperatures, and is among the first things you see in a meteor spectrum when it hits the atmosphere.

[A bright meteor fell over Spain in early 2020, and showed a lot of sodium in its spectrum. Credit: SMART network]

In an article from May 2017 I got into the science of sodium in meteors a little more, and way back in April 2009 I talked about how sodium is seen at low temperatures in meteors.

The whole point here is that it only takes a little bit of sodium to show up very strongly in meteor spectra, so it’s hard to know how much sodium is actually in them. Well, a new article in Icarus just came out where they also note that meteors can be misidentified as sodium-rich when they aren’t. They actually performed experiments by taking meteorites with known amounts of sodium in them and blasting them with plasma to see what the spectra looked like. What they found is that sodium glowed brightly irrespective of the actual meteorite composition!

[In a real-time spectrum of the Spain meteor, sodium (arrowed) glows brightly. Credit: SMART Network]

They note that an H-type chondrite, a kind of meteorite low in sodium, still has spectra that show sodium activity increased by a factor of 40 – 95 as they burn up in our atmosphere!

Meteoroids coming in slowly, say at about 10 kilometers per second, will show this enhanced sodium, so the authors suggest that meteoriticists need to add a speed-dependent category to how meteors are classified.

As an aside, they looked at some actual sodium-enhanced meteors and found that for example, a pair of Perseid meteors seen were probably structurally stronger, with enhanced material strength as well. That hints at their being structural strength dependencies on sodium, a clue toward understanding what these small bodies are like.

So, the next time you watch a meteor shower and see a shooting star flash across the sky, feel free to gaze in awe and delight… but let it also be a reminder that there’s a lot of science involved with these as well, and a lot we can learn about asteroids and comets from them.

You can even make a wish on them if you’d like, but… take it with a grain of salt.

Et alia

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