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| "The Star" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by H. G. Wells | |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | science fiction |
| Publication | |
"The Star" is an 1897 apocalyptic short story by H. G. Wells. [1]
On New Year's Day (about 1900, presumably), astronomers announce that the orbit of the planet Neptune has become erratic. Soon it is discovered that a strange luminous object has entered the Solar System, its gravitational pull causing the disturbance. The object is visible in the sky through "any decent instrument" in the constellation of Leo near Regulus.
Although initially it is only of interest to astronomers, eventually the world media announces that the object is on a collision course with Neptune, and a "planetary collision" is predicted. People around the world gather to see the phenomenon. When the collision occurs, the impact causes a massive explosion, merging the two objects into a single massive conflagration. It is seen from Earth as a bright new star in the sky. The impact robs Neptune of its centrifugal force and out of its solar orbit, sending the fireball careening toward the sun.
As it rises each day, the star is noticeably brighter and larger than the day before, and people realize it is nearer. Many panic and take it as a sign of the end times, while others cite the year 1000, in which humanity also anticipated the world's end. Scientists assure the public there is no danger, as they have plotted the Star's trajectory to carry it harmlessly millions of miles from Earth. Most people go on about their lives without concern for the Star as anything more than a curiosity. Meanwhile a mathematician takes days to calculate a new trajectory, factoring the gravitational pull of Jupiter, previously overlooked by other scientists, which will alter the course of the Star and indeed put Earth in its path. The mathematician claims the fireball will either collide with or closely pass Earth. He is largely ridiculed by science deniers, but soon his theory is proven to be accurate.
Even from millions of miles away, the heat of the star causes the winter snow and ice to thaw, and it begins to melt Earth's ice caps and glaciers, causing global flooding. Its gravity causes massive Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes and hurricanes around the world. Night is turned into a second day, and the skies become a luminous blue. People everywhere seek shelter in the mountains and caves, or crowd aboard ships braving the tumultuous seas. Massive tidal waves wipe out entire islands. Millions perish.
It seems all hope is lost as the massive star is overwhelmingly bright and hot. A collision seems imminent when suddenly, an inexplicable shadow passes across the land, blocking the unbearable light and heat. People look up to see the star has miraculously passed the Earth, and watch as it continues toward the sun. Later it's determined that the gravity of the Earth's moon diverted the Star away from Earth, saving the fraction of humanity who was able to survive.
The landscape of the Earth has been permanently altered, the equatorial regions uninhabitable. Humans settle in new areas close to the poles, where the climate is more temperate. At the end of the story Martian astronomers have witnessed the event, and observe that not much has changed on the distant planet apart from the melting of ice at the poles.
An astronomer named Ogilvy appears at the start of the story. An astronomer named Ogilvy also appears at the start of Wells's novel The War of the Worlds .
The early part of the story, before the dire danger had become obvious, includes a reference to a South African city where "a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. 'Even the skies have illuminated,' said the flatterer". This is considered to be a snide reference to Cecil Rhodes, at the height of his power and influence at the time of writing.
The master mathematician's defiance of the Star: "He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. 'You may kill me,' he said after a silence. 'But I can hold you – and all the universe for that matter – in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now" is a clear statement of 19th century scientific rationalism, the world-view which Wells strongly shared.
This story is often credited with having created a science fiction subgenre depicting the impact event of a planet or star colliding, or near-colliding with Earth – such as the 1933 novel When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (made into a film in 1951), Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer (1965), and Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1977).
However, it was preceded by two stories in 1894: Omega: The Last Days of the World by Camille Flammarion (the astronomer of the Flammarion Catalog) and Olga Romanoff or, The Syren of the Skies by George Griffith. In 1895, Griffith used a comet disaster again in The Outlaws of the Air . Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion depicted an Earth collision with a comet that altered the atmosphere, causing a higher concentration of Oxygen which subsequently immolates to destroy all life on Earth. Jules Verne's 1877 novel Hector Servadac describes a comet colliding with Earth, taking bits of land (and inhabitants) with it on its orbit around the Sun.
The story is mentioned in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama , and Clarke also used the title for a story of his own.
The radio anthology series Radio Tales adapted the story into an episode called "Asteroid".
The graphic novel Bloodstar uses Wells's story as the prelude to the post-apocalyptic situation in which the plot – itself derived from a short story by Robert E. Howard – is set.
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was a comet that broke apart in July 1992 and collided with Jupiter in July 1994, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. This generated a large amount of coverage in the popular media, and the comet was closely observed by astronomers worldwide. The collision provided new information about Jupiter and highlighted its possible role in reducing space debris in the inner Solar System.
The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles, such as methane, ammonia, and water. The Kuiper belt is home to most of the objects that astronomers generally accept as dwarf planets: Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar, and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, may have originated in the region.
The Oort cloud, sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU. The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.
Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and continued at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell's quest for Planet X. Lowell proposed the Planet X hypothesis to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the giant planets, particularly Uranus and Neptune, speculating that the gravity of a large unseen ninth planet could have perturbed Uranus enough to account for the irregularities.
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc. The Sun is a typical star that maintains a balanced equilibrium by the fusion of hydrogen into helium at its core, releasing this energy from its outer photosphere. Astronomers classify it as a G-type main-sequence star.
A meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space. Meteoroids are distinguished as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than meteoroids are classified as micrometeoroids or space dust. Many are fragments from comets or asteroids, whereas others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars.
An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect. When large objects impact terrestrial planets such as the Earth, there can be significant physical and biospheric consequences, as the impacting body is usually traveling at several kilometres a second, though atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry. Impact craters and structures are dominant landforms on many of the Solar System's solid objects and present the strongest empirical evidence for their frequency and scale.
The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, which are named for minor water deities and a water creature in Greek mythology. By far the largest of them is Triton, discovered by William Lassell on 10 October 1846, 17 days after the discovery of Neptune itself. Over a century passed before the discovery of the second natural satellite, Nereid, in 1949, and another 40 years passed before Proteus, Neptune's second-largest moon, was discovered in 1989.
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The Nibiru cataclysm is a supposed disastrous encounter between Earth and a large planetary object that certain groups believed would take place in the early 21st century. Believers in this doomsday event usually refer to this object as Nibiru or Planet X. The idea was first put forward in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, founder of the website ZetaTalk. Lieder claims she is a contactee with the ability to receive messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain. She states that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 causing Earth to undergo a physical pole shift that would destroy most of humanity.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to astronomy:
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Fictional planets of the Solar System have been depicted since the 1700s—often but not always corresponding to hypothetical planets that have at one point or another been seriously proposed by real-world astronomers, though commonly persisting in fiction long after the underlying scientific theories have been refuted. Vulcan was a planet hypothesized to exist inside the orbit of Mercury between 1859 and 1915 to explain anomalies in Mercury's orbit until Einstein's theory of general relativity resolved the matter; it continued to appear in fiction as late as the 1960s. Counter-Earth—a planet diametrically opposite Earth in its orbit around the Sun—was originally proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Philolaus in the fifth century BCE, and has appeared in fiction since at least the late 1800s. It is sometimes depicted as very similar to Earth and other times very different, often used as a vehicle for satire, and frequently inhabited by counterparts of the people of Earth. Following the discovery of the first asteroids in the early 1800s, it was suggested that the asteroid belt might be the remnants of a planet predicted by the Titius–Bode law to exist between Mars and Jupiter that had somehow been destroyed; this hypothetical former fifth planet is known as Phaëton in astronomy and often dubbed "Bodia" in science fiction. Bodia was popular in the pulp era of science fiction, where it was often depicted as similar to Earth and inhabited by humans who might occasionally be the ancestors of humans on Earth, and stories about its destruction became increasingly common following the invention of the atomic bomb in 1945. Additional planets in the outer reaches of the Solar System, such as a ninth planet beyond Neptune or especially a tenth beyond Pluto, appear regularly. Many different names for this hypothetical outermost planet have been used, the most common being "Persephone". Some stories depict so-called rogue planets that do not orbit any star entering the Solar System from without, typically on a collision course with Earth. Less frequently, fictional planets appear in other locations, such as between Venus and Earth or inside a hollow Earth. Similarly, fictional moons appear in some works; fictional additional moons of the Earth largely fell out of favour with the advent of the Space Age.
Retrograde motion in astronomy is, in general, orbital or rotational motion of an object in the direction opposite the rotation of its primary, that is, the central object. It may also describe other motions such as precession or nutation of an object's rotational axis. Prograde or direct motion is more normal motion in the same direction as the primary rotates. However, "retrograde" and "prograde" can also refer to an object other than the primary if so described. The direction of rotation is determined by an inertial frame of reference, such as distant fixed stars.
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The 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) took place in Washington, D.C., Jan. 3 to Jan. 7, 2010. It is one of the largest astronomy meetings ever to take place as 3,500 astronomers and researchers were expected to attend and give more than 2,200 scientific presentations. The meeting was actually billed as the "largest Astronomy meeting in the universe". An array of discoveries were announced, along with new views of the universe that we inhabit; such as quiet planets like Earth - where life could develop are probably plentiful, even though an abundance of cosmic hurdles exist - such as experienced by our own planet in the past.
A stellar collision is the coming together of two stars caused by stellar dynamics within a star cluster, or by the orbital decay of a binary star due to stellar mass loss or gravitational radiation, or by other mechanisms not yet well understood.
This glossary of astronomy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to astronomy and cosmology, their sub-disciplines, and related fields. Astronomy is concerned with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth. The field of astronomy features an extensive vocabulary and a significant amount of jargon.
Planet Nine is a hypothetical ninth planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the peculiar clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth. These ETNOs tend to make their closest approaches to the Sun in one sector, and their orbits are similarly tilted. These alignments suggest that an undiscovered planet may be shepherding the orbits of the most distant known Solar System objects. Nonetheless, some astronomers question this conclusion and instead assert that the clustering of the ETNOs' orbits is due to observational biases, resulting from the difficulty of discovering and tracking these objects during much of the year.
In modern times, numerous impact events on Jupiter have been observed, the most significant of which was the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1994. Jupiter is the most massive planet in the Solar System and thus has a vast sphere of gravitational influence, the region of space where an asteroid capture can take place under favorable conditions.
The Star public domain audiobook at LibriVox