Strange Stars and Stranger Stars
Zach Smith
Ah, you’ve arrived, said Xarlox. Welcome to our strange little family reunion. No, I know you're not part of this family, specifically, but you have found it nonetheless, and you couldn’t have found it unless you were invited. This isn’t a family of what we are, no, this, surprisingly, is a family of stars. A strange family of stars, a family of strange stars.
What does that mean?
You’ll find out.
You’ll find out soon enough.
This little corner of the universe we call the Nebula. But it’s not like any other Nebula. It's an unusual piece of the universe. It exists frozen in time. Part of and apart from the universe as a whole. Able to contain within its ill-defined, but ever-shrinking boundaries, stars that could only exist in the past and stars that can only exist in the far future.
Uncle Cris owns the Nebula, at least so much as anything (star or otherwise) can own the general nothingness of a region of space. He scours the Nebula, preparing for the reunion.
He is a strange star, Uncle Cris, strange in his nature yes, but also in his substance. A star made of strange matter.
There are six different flavors of quarks, all with unusual names: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charm, and of course Strange. Strange Matter is made up entirely of strange quarks. Strange Matter is Color Superconductive and if any other kind of material touches strange matter, it will immediately become strange matter and rapidly transform into a gooey soup of quarks.
Strange matter makes for strange stars. You don’t want to touch Uncle Cris. If, that is, what you were made of matter, but we both know that is not entirely the case. Regardless I would still avoid him.
He has not been the same for a while. He looks out from the Nebula, seeing the stars in the galaxy’s overhead, getting closer and closer every day. They want his nebula, and it’s getting harder for him to avoid their gaze.
It makes him angry, but sad too. Those Galaxies of ordinary stars, of various sizes and colors, don’t understand their past, their antecedence, or their future. They want the Nebula, his Nebula, yet have forgotten what it is and why it is so important.
But Uncle Cris has not forgotten, and neither has the rest of the family.
Yes, he is a strange star, but hardly the strangest.
Thip arrives with a smattering of family of his own. Young stars, yellow and bright and ordinary with millions of years left in their ordinary lives. Uncle Cris gets the feeling that they will run off with the other ordinary stars in the ordinary galaxies if they could, or perhaps not “if they could” but “when they can.”
Thip is no ordinary star. He is a Neutron Star. His substance a degenerate matter of decayed atoms, only the neutrons of what he once was, the remnant of a bigger brighter star who has shed the skin of his past. He is dense, the mass of about one and half times your sun, compacted within a radius of some six miles.
Just a small lake of superfluid neutrons.
Superconductive, superfluid, we could call this the superfamily if we wanted, instead of the strange family.
What is a superfluid?
Imagine if you were to stick a big wooden spoon into a pitcher of water, or better yet iced tea, and swirled it around, if that iced tea was a superfluid it would never stop spinning.
A pitcher of neutron matter would weigh far too much for any pitcher to hold. A single teaspoon of neutron matter would weigh more than the planet you come from.
But it’s not just the young stars that Thip brings, he has brought Aunt Treots with him too. She is old, very old. The universe right now is some fourteen billion years old, and Treots has been burning for thirteen billion of those years. No star can be much older than that, at this time.
Maybe Aunt Treots, the red dwarf, isn’t the strangest star in the Nebula, but it is strange the way she started with far less fuel than her nieces and nephews, yet she is older than the rest of them by a great deal and will remain, for another trillion years, long after the rest of them. Aunt Treots is both very old and still in her infancy. It will be many cosmological decades before she burns to nothing, and when she does it will be the end of the universe as we know it.
Given her size and age, there is little Aunt Treots can do, accept remember the universe as it was, and tell us maybe, just maybe, given her age and experience and wisdom, what the universe will be like after she is gone. She sits alone with her memories, her wisdom untapped, while Thip and Cris, and a few of the young and ordinary stars go about their business, setting up for the rest of the family.
There hasn’t been a gathering like this in three cosmological decades, the time between each decade gets longer and longer and the family was worried there may not be another. The strange stars in the universe tend to be content with staying in their own galaxies, their own times. They don’t need to remember their ancestry. Over time they forget. But every now and then they do remember and they do reconvene at the Nebula as they have done in decades past.
A cosmological decade is not a decade in the way you might know it. It is not a unit of time measured the way a regular decade is. Each Decade is ten times as long as the last. The universe was a hundred million years old during the last strange family gathering, though it was much the same as the universe today, in an overall sort of way.
Uzreilt had often been ignored by the family for being so different from the rest of them. Yet as she has grown older and matured, the others can't help but be drawn to her, to her alien beauty and something that it would be poetic to categorize as indescribable, but scientifically can be described if not fully appreciated.
She’s a Magnetar, a very active and very powerful neutron star. Around her glows a magnetic aura so powerful you can almost see it radiating from her with the naked eye. Her life, her beauty, that which makes her special, is fleeting, transient, it will only last ten thousand years or so, after which she will be more like Uncle Thip, just another neutron star. Ten thousand years to a star is hardly any time at all.
Of course, a neutron star is strange in its own right, and she will always be part of the family, even if she wasn’t accepted at first. For now, though, she will use her magnetism to draw the attention of the other strange stars.
Dric arrives from the Small Magellanic Cloud and Wophil from Mayall’s Object, both with their own families of stars in tow.
Cousin Praaclul, who was riding along on the celestial journey through time and the filaments of the universe with Dric. Had been dropped off in Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, because he was convinced that Wophil forgot how to find the Nebula.
As Wophill, passed through Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte he saw this forlorn star, in a galaxy he shouldn’t have been in at all unless it was simply to pass through, the way the other stars have passed through time and space and matter to reach the Nebula. When Wophill took a closer look at this strange and out-of-place star he noticed that it was Cousin Praaclul, and laughing, picked him up to bring him along to the reunion.
Why shouldn’t Cousin Praaclul have been in that galaxy?
Praaclul is a quasi-star. And you thought the other stars were strange, Praaclul can’t even exist in the universe as it is now, but only in the early universe. He is a star so large that his core has already collapsed into a black hole, and his outer reaches were unaffected by the collapse. He is massive, a thousand times as massive as your sun, with a waist nearly as wide as the orbit of your Pluto. Yet still a single star. He keeps his equilibrium by the infall of stellar material.
Dric and Wophil are strange stars too, nontraditional stars. Dric is a Q Star and Wophril a Preon Star.
I’ve already explained the Neutron Star, a Preon Star is even smaller and even more powerful.
What’s a preon?
It’s the things that makeup quarks (which themselves are already very small). A neutron star is some twelve miles or so in diameter, a Preon Star, has the same weight roughly, compacted into the size of a softball.
Anything heavier (by volume) I dare you to find.
Well, there is something heavier, of course, Cousin Wophril is a Q Star. Q does not stand for Quark but the conserved particles number. A Q Star is also called a Grey Hole. So heavy, so dense, so compact, that like a black hole it will take in light, but unlike a black hole it is not quite heavy enough to take in all light.
Harex and Niheft stand off to the side. They are not of the universe as it is.
Sure, their antecedents may have connected them to the other strange stars of the family, but they have come from a distant future, altogether alien to the gathering of the strange stars of the Nebula.
Harex is an Iron Star and Niheft, his wife, a black dwarf. Old and ancient but holding on to one another for dear life, and this eternal grip has kept them alive beyond the years that eternity itself seems to represent.
A black dwarf is a white dwarf that has grown so old and cold that it no longer emits any light. You won’t see these stars until maybe Decade 15 at the earliest.
Harex, the Iron Star, is older yet, much much older. He is a massive solid cold ball of iron from Decade 1500. Much older than the other strange stars that gather here.
The rest of the family arrives.
They are strange and stranger even compared to the strange family, in that they are not even stars at all. Zliamip is a Black Hole and Treota a lowly photon.
Sure, these are common in the universe now, and will be for much longer. Strange to be at a family gathering like this yes, but they are both the distant offspring of the other stars gathered in the Nebula.
Black holes have been in the Universe since just after the Big Bang and will remain in the universe long after the last of the more traditional stars burn to nothing. Between decades 38 to 99, they will be the only recognizable objects in a vast cold, and dark universe. Some of the biggest black holes will be around a few decades longer.
How old is Aunt Zliamip? Who can say? And I wouldn’t ask her, it would be quite rude to do so. She may have been a star before, she may have been born anywhere from Decade 6 to Decade 14. Or she may not have been a star at all, but an unexploded chunk of the Big Bang itself, born in Decade 0 or as it was not even born at all.
And what of Uncle Treota, who was never a star. He exists now, he and his kind existed in the distant past, and they will exist in the far future. Given certain universe properties, after Decade 100 Uncle Treota, the lowly photon, will exist and move about at the speed of light in a dark and uneventful universe so vast and empty that it will seem as though he is standing still. In the utter darkness, a single photon will burn bright as a star. Single candles and what not.
But maybe I’m getting too philosophical.
The end of the universe is a different story altogether.
The family is all here, all the strange stars that could make it to the Nebula.
There are many that don’t come, too many to name or even to count. Ultra exotic stars like Plank Stars that are so small and compact they can only exist inside a black hole, and Black stars different from Black Holes and Black Dwarfs; are all unable to attend the reunion.
There are more stars that exist in the universe than there are grains of sand on any given beach. In the vast universe, there are more stars than grains of sand on every beach in every world, as sandy beaches are rarer than you might imagine.
But those who have arrived at the Nebula, enjoy each other's company. Asking how things are in the galaxies and times they come from. There is a lot to tell, updating, and debriefing for the others in the family.
Uncle Cris, who owns the Nebula, and who has organized this gathering, brings out the family scrapbook, which shows the history of the family and the Nebula; and by proxy the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the inception of the proto-stars, the genesis of the quasi-star, the traditional stars, and onward to the black dwarfs, the black holes, the iron stars and the last of the lowly photons.
Cousin Dric and Uncle Wirple pack up and begin their preparations to head back to their home galaxies. It is no easy feat to come here to the Nebula, and only slightly easier to return home.
But before they can leave, there is one more tradition they must uphold above all the others.
They must stand for the family photo.
They line up by size.
Praaclul the Quasi-Star, so large he dwarfs every other star in the family, stands far in the back to get the rest in the shot.
The iron star Harex is next, as he is a large star, very old and very cold, and his perfectly smooth iron surface, unrusted in the vacuum of space, reflects the light of the surrounding stars like a mirror.
Many of the Strange family, like Uncle Cris, are compact stars. Their interesting properties are inversely proportional to their actual size, measured by their surface and not their influence on the environment around them. They are so small, they stand in the front.
Aunt Zliamip, the black hole, can’t actually be seen in the photograph, but what can be seen is the way that the light, from Praaclul and the other stars, bends around her and shines no light through her absent middle section.
The photon Treota, the oldest of the family, the only one to survive well into the dark decades, is in the portrait too, along with a billion billion other photons emitted from the other strange stars gathered at the Nebula, they are the reasons the picture can even be taken at all.
Present too in the strange photograph, are the millions and millions of stars from the neighboring galaxy.
Through the lens of his camera Uncle Cris can see the stars in the neighboring galaxy coming toward him, always coming toward him, toward the Nebula. They want it, this little corner of space where the strange stars gather every couple of decades. They are coming for it, they want it for their own normal main-sequence lives.
And he is looking at those stars, seeing them coming toward him, and organizing themselves so that they spell out a single word... leave.
About the Author
Zach Smith is a writer of mostly short fiction in a variety of genres from the suburban Philadelphia area. Recent stories of his have appeared in Concinnity, New Pop Lit, and the Short Humour Site. He is currently working on two story collections: “Clouds Over Pancake Mountain” and “Realms Beyond Midnight World: A VHS Mix Tape.” You can find links to some of his other stories and unusual reviews at: theobscuritysymposium.wordpress.com.
© Strange Stars and Strangers Stars by Zach Smith. 2022. All rights reserved.
