Voyage of the Stars

Chapter 8 Disaster without warning

Without any warning, the large-aperture optical telescope in orbit around Jupiter suddenly discovered something strange in the starry sky.

During the observations by the observatory personnel, they first discovered that the brightness of a certain location in the starry sky increased significantly. The staff immediately issued remote control commands to the telescope to adjust its attitude and align it with the starry sky where the light source was unusual, and at the same time quickly calculated its position.

The location was so familiar to humans that the observatory personnel recognized it immediately.

It is a three-star system in the constellation Centauri, which is a triple star system composed of Proxima Centauri A, Proxima Centauri B.

"What's going on with this brightness? It's still increasing. It's so fast that the telescope is going blind." Anxious shouts rang out from the observation station. They had never encountered such a situation before.

Yes, the optical telescope is going blind.

As soon as the observer finished shouting, the observation station lost the signal from the optical telescope.

Immediately afterwards, sirens sounded from the observation station.

"This voice."

"It's the siren sound of a gamma ray detector."

The person on duty is not a dawdling player. Just by listening to the sound, he can tell that this is a situation that occurs when dense gamma rays are detected.

This set of gamma ray detectors is connected to two gamma ray telescopes, one in the orbit of Callisto and the other in the orbit of Jupiter, both of which are specially designed to detect cosmic rays.

Now that an explosion of gamma ray radiation has been detected, it is certain that the source of the rays comes from the universe. Combined with the position information determined before the optical telescope lost contact, the accident point can be determined to be the Centauri triple star system.

What happened somewhere?
The officer on duty sent the message to the Callisto base without having time to think about it.Then, just as he was hesitating whether to leave his post and report to his superiors, the fluctuations in the detector suddenly increased exponentially, and then he could no longer receive signals.

at the same time.

Callisto base.

Seven or eight people have gathered in front of Yue Yuan. Except for Zhu Pite, the assistant who has been following him, the rest are all experts.

There were people from particle physics, astrophysics, and an important government official who came in a hurry. He obviously came in a hurry after getting the news.

"Chief of the base, it's bad. All communications outside have been cut off. We can't contact Yinghuo Base, and we can't contact Guanghan Palace either." This administrative official jumped over and said, It looked like the sky was falling, but as soon as she entered Yue Yuan's office, she choked. She probably didn't expect there to be so many people here.

The gravity on Callisto is a little lower than that of the moon, so everyone jumps and jumps when running, as if they are walking on water.

In fact, Yue Yuan got far more information than everyone in front of him, so he knew that the situation was far more serious than imagined.

Just now, he received a message from Yinghuo Base. The message was very short because it was disconnected before it was completed.

During this period, due to their orbits, Mars and Jupiter happened to be on the same side and relatively close to each other, so communications from the earth to the Callisto base were basically sent from the nearest Yinghuo base.

The message is divided into several messages, each message is about a few minutes apart, and the content is as follows. [Calisto, Callisto, this is the Yinghuo base. News from the earth has been received. The Xihe solar probe has observed a sharp increase in solar radiation. The reason is unknown. It is recommended to prepare for sunspot riots in advance. 】

[Calisto Base, this is the Yinghuo Base. According to the latest news, the sun may intensify its activity in the short term due to unknown reasons, and the solar wind may strengthen, which may cause interstellar communications to be interrupted. Please be prepared accordingly. 】

[Calisto Base, this is the Yinghuo Base. The sun is violently rioting due to unknown reasons, and the gamma ray level has exceeded the highest level in history.]

[Oh my God, it’s over, the sun. The sun is sizzling, kaka, sizzling]

While receiving the message from the Yinghuo base, the Callisto base also received an image message from the Earth.

The screen is displayed after computer processing.

The surface of the sun suddenly distorted, as if there was a hole missing, and then it ejected a flame hundreds of millions of kilometers away, as if it were a prominence magnified hundreds of times. The prominences continued to grow, and it looked like the surface of the sun had been sucked in by a giant. , countless hot flames spewed out, and then the flames fell back, the brightness of the sun suddenly increased, and the picture turned into a vast expanse of white, and then stopped abruptly.

At this time, Yue Yuan didn't care so much. He said the news he got as briefly as possible without losing the important information. Then he glanced at the people in front of him with a serious expression and said: "What do you think? ?”

Everyone present discussed it in a whirlwind manner. Most of them were experts in various fields. Naturally, they all knew the seriousness of this matter. They had probably thought about the worst in their minds, but no one took the initiative first. speak out.

"These days are different from the past. Don't hide anything you have to say." Yue Yuan spoke immediately upon seeing this.

As soon as Yue Yuan finished speaking, he heard a voice accompanying the person who pushed the door open and reached everyone's ears: "Supernova explosion!"

Yue Yuan looked up and saw that the person who came was about fifty years old, wearing regular clothes, with mottled white hair clearly visible among the sparse black hair on his head.He was very familiar with this person. His name was Gander. He was the resident astronomer and astrophysicist at the Callisto base. He was in charge of several major astronomical telescopes at the Callisto base.

I came here now, probably because I noticed something strange about the Centauri triple star.

As the base commander, Yue Yuan knew that the unusual time of discovering the Centauri Triple Star System was actually later than the time when the information came from Yinghuo Base.

If not, the Callisto base should have sent a message to the Yinghuo base to warn that the Centauri triple star system was sending strange things first, not the other way around.

Gander, who usually behaved very calmly and calmly, seemed very uneasy. He thought that Yue Yuan had not heard what he just said, so he squeezed in among the people present and continued: "A supernova broke out. A supernova occurred in the Centauri triple star system. According to the data returned by the detectors we sent to the outer planets of the solar system, there was not one explosion, but three, three, three, including Nanmen A, Nanmen B, Proxima Centauri, and the strange luminosities coming from three stars one after another. It has been determined.”

"How is that possible? Forget about Nanmen II A and B, Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star. How could a supernova explosion happen?" someone murmured.

"It's definitely impossible under normal circumstances. Not to mention Proxima Centauri, Nanmen A and B will not have supernova explosions under normal circumstances, so this is not normal." Although Gander was anxious, he explained patiently One sentence.

Then, he said: "This will be a disaster. The Centaur triple star system is only 1.3 parsecs from our solar system. It is too close. The earth's magnetic field cannot withstand this super strong gamma ray burst. What's more, What’s more, external communications should have been cut off now. We can’t send information back to Earth. Now we can only pray that they can receive the information sent back by those detectors as soon as possible.”

Gander's voice gradually became softer, because he knew that even if he was discovered, the remaining time would only be enough for some people to hide underground, and most people and all creatures around the world would not escape the same fate.

Gander was thinking this now, apparently because he had just arrived and didn't know that the same disaster had happened to the sun.

(End of this chapter)