- 2013.03.06, 11:05
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THE IRON SUNRISE
IMPACT: T zero
Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.
Something—some exotic force of unnatural origin—twisted a knot in space, enclosing the heart of a
stellar furnace. A huge loop of superstrings twisted askew, expanding and contracting until the core of
the star floated adrift in a pocket universe where the timelike dimension was rolled shut on the scale of
the Planck length, and another dimension—one of the closed ones, folded shut on themselves, implied
by the standard model of physics—replaced it. An enormous span of time reeled past within the pocket
universe, while outside a handful of seconds ticked by.
From the perspective of the drifting core, the rest of the universe appeared to recede to infinity,
vanishing past an event horizon beyond which it was destined to stay until the zone of expansion
collapsed. The blazing ball of gas lit up its own private cosmos, then slowly faded. Time passed,
uncountable amounts of time wrapped up in an eyeblink from the perspective of the external universe.
The stellar core cooled and contracted, dimming. Eventually a black dwarf hung alone, cooling toward
absolute zero. Fusion didn't stop but ran incredibly slowly, mediated by quantum tunneling under
conditions of extreme cold. Over a span billions of times greater than that which had elapsed since the
big bang in the universe outside, light nuclei merged, tunneling across the high quantum wall of their
electron orbitals. Heavier elements disintegrated slowly, fissioning and then decaying down to iron.
Mass migrated until, by the end of the process, a billion trillion years down the line, the star was a single
crystal of iron crushed down into a sphere a few thousand kilometers in diameter, spinning slowly in a
cold vacuum only trillionths of a degree above absolute zero.
Then the external force that had created the pocket universe went into reverse, snapping shut the pocket
and dropping the dense spherical crystal into the hole at the core of the star, less than thirty seconds after
the bomb had gone off. And the gates of hell opened.
Iron doesn't fuse easily: the process is endothermic, absorbing energy. When the guts were scooped out
of the star and replaced with a tiny cannonball of cold degenerate matter, the outer layers of the star,
held away from the core by radiation pressure, began to collapse inward across a gap of roughly a
quarter million kilometers of cold vacuum. The outer shell rushed in fast, accelerating in the grip of a
stellar gravity well. Minutes passed, and from the outside the photosphere of the star appeared to
contract slightly as huge vortices of hot turbulent gas swirled and fulminated across it. Then the
hammerblow of the implosion front reached the core ...
There was scant warning for the inhabitants of the planet that had been targeted for murder. For a few
minutes, star-watching satellites reported an imminent solar flare, irregularities leading to atmospheric
effects, aurorae, and storm warnings for orbital workers and miners in the asteroid belt. Maybe one or
two of the satellites had causal channels, limited bandwidth instantaneous communicators, unjammable
but expensive and touchy. But there wasn't enough warning to help anyone escape: the satellites simply
went off-line one by one as a wave of failure crept outward from the star at the speed of light. In one
research institute a meteorologist frowned at her workstation in bemusement, and tried to drill down a
diagnostic—she was the only person on the planet who had time to realize something strange was
happening. But the satellites she was tracking orbited only three light minutes closer to the star than the
planet she lived on, and already she had lost two minutes chatting to a colleague about to go on her
lunch break about the price of a house she would never buy now, out on the shore of a bay of lost
dreams.
The hammerfall was a spherical shock wave of hydrogen plasma, blazing at a temperature of millions of
degrees and compressed until it had many of the properties of metal. A hundred times as massive as the
largest gas giant in the star system, by the time it slammed into the crystal of iron at the heart of the
murdered star it was traveling at almost 2 percent of lightspeed. When it struck, a tenth of the
gravitational potential energy of the star was converted into radiation in a matter of seconds. Fusion
restarted, exotic reactions taking place as even the iron core began to soak up nuclei, building heavier
and hotter and less stable intermediaries. In less than ten seconds, the star burned through a visible
percentage of its fuel, enough to keep the fires banked for a billion years. There wasn't enough mass in
the G-type dwarf to exceed the electron degeneracy pressure in its core, collapsing it into a neutron star,
but nevertheless a respectable shock front, almost a hundredth as potent as a supernova, rebounded from
the core.
A huge pulse of neutrinos erupted outward, carrying away much of the energy from the prompt fusion
burn. The neutral particles didn't usually react with matter; the average neutrino could zip through a light
year of lead without noticing. But there were so many of them that, as they sluiced through the outer
layers of the star, they deposited a good chunk of their energy in the roiling bubble of foggy plasma that
had replaced the photosphere. Not far behind them, a tidal wave of hard gamma radiation and neutrons a
billion times brighter than the star ripped through the lower layers, blasting them apart. The dying star
flashed a brilliant X-ray pulse like a trillion hydrogen bombs detonating in concert: and the neutrino
pulse rolled out at the speed of light.
Eight minutes later—about a minute after she noticed the problem with the flare monitors—the
meteorologist frowned. A hot, prickling flush seemed to crawl across her skin, itching: her vision was
inexplicably streaked by crawling purple meteors. The desk in front of her flickered and died. She
inhaled, smelling the sharp stink of ozone, looked round shaking her head to clear the sudden fog, and
saw her colleague staring at her and blinking. "Hey, I feel like somebody just walked on my grave—"
The lights flickered and died, but she had no trouble seeing because the air was alive with an eerie glow,
and the small skylight window cast razor-sharp shadows on the floor. Then the patch of floor directly
illuminated by the window began to smoke, and the meteorologist realized, fuzzily, that she wasn't going
to buy that house after all, wasn't going to tell her partner about it, wasn't ever going to see him again, or
her parents, or her sister, or anything but that smoking square of brilliance that was slowly growing as
the window frame burned away.
She received a small mercy: mere seconds later the upper atmosphere—turned into an anvil of plasma
by the passing radiation pulse—reached the tropopause. Half a minute later the first shock wave leveled
her building. She didn't die alone; despite the lethal dose they all received from the neutrino pulse,
nobody on the planet lived past the iron sunrise for long enough to feel the pangs of radiation sickness. - 0 rakstair doma
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