The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  In this small patch of apparently empty space, were visible thousands if not hundreds of thousands of galaxies, all visible because they had accumulated the photons over time, making single photons otherwise not visible, visible due to aggregation. He realized this is what he had to do.

  He explained the issue to Ramesh. “We can use most of the program that we wrote in our first attempt when we were trying to analyze the Sedna – 1 images. The difference was that then we were looking at stars, so when we composite images we were worried about too much light accumulating, hence we had to write the complicated algorithm to eliminate random white noise.

  This case is much simpler. We are looking at an apparently blank patch of the sky with too few photons. We delete the algorithm to eliminate the random white noise and simply let the photons accumulate.” Ramesh said, and then answered the unasked question that he could see in Jorge’s eyes. “Ten minutes tops.”

  In the end it took Ramesh only seven minutes to change the program. They still had not started receiving the data, but set up the program to receive the data and start accumulating. Since Ramesh had a few minutes at hand, he added a nice touch.

  The program would ping and highlight any area which became 1% brighter than the surroundings. This would not be discernible by human eye, so the computer would give them a head start in concentrating over any area that started brightening.

  The data stream started almost 10 minutes later than what Alvarez had indicated, but Jorge didn’t begrudge the man. When you are controlling equipment tens of thousands of kilometer away in space, such allowances have to be made.

  It was like watching grass grow under your feet. Both the men were pacing and going crazy in anticipation. Intellectually they knew that it could take hours, days or even weeks to get a picture, but their hearts wouldn’t let them believe that. The impatience of youth was screaming that they wanted results now.

  It was nearly 8 am in the morning. Both the men had spent nearly 24 hours at the office and had started stinking. There was no shower facility in the men’s room, but they decided to sponge themselves. Jorge had taken the time to inform Heidi about their discovery as well as his conversation and arrangement with Herman.

  He got an admonishment from Heidi for not waking her up. She extracted a promise from Jorge that next time he would call her, even if it was the middle of the night. Only after that she congratulated both of them and let them know how proud she was of them.

  They were just having their fourth continuous meal in the office of Bagels and donuts from the department canteen, when Ramesh’s program pinged. Jorge’s donut fell from his hands on the table. They looked at the screen, and there was a small pointer on the screen highlighting an area.

  As expected they could not really see anything out there, but there was something out there. He looked at the screen timer. It had taken 66 minutes of photon accumulation to get to this point. What could they do to speed this up? He was impatient beyond words now.

  He realized that there was something that he could do, that would not only speed up the process, but get them a better image. He had noted from the data streamed, that the width of the field of vision of the telescope that been set to a medium size.

  This was understandable at the time. You were pointing to an empty patch of the sky, and did not know what exactly you were looking at if anything at all. It made sense to keep the field of vision a bit wide, lest you miss out the object of interest altogether.

  Now however there was an area of interest. It was actually on the lower left side of the screen. If they narrowed their field of vision on the telescope and concentrated only on that area, not only would they accumulate faster, they would get a more magnified picture!

  “Ramesh, is it possible for you to change the pointer from an arrow to an outline of the shape of the image the computer is seeing? I mean draw out the outline of the shape rather than point an arrow at it? Since we cannot visually see it yet, we don’t know how big an area is getting highlighted.” Jorge asked Ramesh.

  “Sure. That is a trivial task.” Ramesh said as he got on to the task. He got down to doing it and within less than a minute, the arrow was gone and was replaced by a small rough spheroid shape with jagged edges. Jorge blew a soft whistle. It confirms that the body is not a rock with a rough shape, but a sphere.

  The jagged edges on the screen will smoothen with better resolution. He immediately placed a call to Alvarez, who was about to go for lunch, but was thankfully at his desk. Jorge sent him a screen shot of what they were seeing on the terminal, and explained his logic of speeding up and enhancing the magnification of the image of the body they were seeing.

  Alvarez was only too happy to have his telescope freed faster, and quickly ordered his technical staff to reduce the field of vision to the smallest possible width centered on the co-ordinates of the object.

  This time the change of parameters on the telescope did not take very long, since it was already pointed in the right direction. Within seven minutes, they were getting images now centered on the object.

  It took Ramesh about the same amount of time to adjust his program as well, to adjust to the new data, while not having to throw the old data. He cropped the old image data and zoomed them, and then added them to the new incoming data.

  The result was dramatic. Within 15 minutes of the change, they no longer needed the computer generated outline to distinguish the object from the surroundings. After another 15 minutes, Jorge asked Ramesh to remove the computer generated outline altogether, as it was getting distracting.

  They were seeing a sphere. To be more precise, they were seeing the heat of the sphere, since they were watching in infrared.

  “It exists! Our alien home world. Ramesh we did it!” Jorge was saying, but Ramesh was lost in his thoughts watching the sphere form on the screen. Seeing Ramesh, Jorge asked concerned, “Hey are you OK buddy?”

  “I am fine, thanks. It is just that watching that sphere slowly form on the screen, fills me with dread somewhere deep inside me. It is as if slowly I am seeing the face of evil form in front of me on the screen. As I stare at that thing, a scene from an old Indian horror movie comes to my mind, where evil slowly makes its appearance on the screen, and a word just keeps repeating over and over in the background. Shaitan, Shaitan, Shaitan. It’s a Hindi word meaning evil, or an evil person. I just can’t help feeling that I am watching the slow appearance of Shaitan.” Ramesh was philosophical now.

  “He… he… That sounds awfully like Satan.” Jorge joked.

  “That is because it is the same word, just like many other words in Indo-European languages. English and Hindi are both Indo-European languages and share a lot of words in common”. Ramesh said professorially.

  “I stand educated.” Jorge said with a mock bow. “Right now though we need to find out a lot about that body. I suspect it is a brown dwarf. I suspect it is not very far from us, at least not more than a few light years. There are a lot of things I suspect and want to know.

  Let us first start with the most important thing as far as humans are concerned. Let us find its distance. We need to know how far the aliens are, how long will it take them for their next visit? Can we ever strike back at their home world if it came to war? There are so many questions.”

  “How do you plan to find out the distance? I assume it would be some cool sophisticated astronomy trade secret.” Ramesh was genuinely curious.

  “Actually I intend to try and use one of the oldest methods in modern astronomy. It has been used for the last four hundred years. It’s called the parallax method. It is a simple trick of geometry. Engineers use it all the time, though they call the math trigonometry.

  You watch the star from one point, move to a different point and then watch it again, and note the difference in the angle. Since you know how much you moved, it is a simple calculation to get the length of the sides of the triangle, which happens to be the distance to the star!

  Normally for far away star
s you need to move a large distance to see a change in angle. The most effective method is to watch the star when earth is at one end of the sun in orbit. Then after 6 months watch the star again when the earth is at the opposite end of the orbit. The distance is large enough to make a slight change in angle, and we know the length between the two ends of earth’s orbit round the sun.

  We however do not have 6 months to wait, we need to know now. We will simply watch the star from two different telescopes placed in space reasonably far enough right now. And I know just the telescope and the person controlling it!

  It was a good thing that we are right now observing through Herman’s infrared telescope. This one placed in a sun synchronous orbit. This means that the telescope is not orbiting earth. It is orbiting the sun directly, but on the same orbit as earth. In fact it is racing about 300 thousand Kilometers ahead of earth, exactly at the same speed as earth around the sun.”

  “Why would anyone put the telescope in such an orbit? Sounds complicated and dangerous, and probably spends more jet fuel. What if earth were to somehow run into it?” Ramesh interrupted Jorge.

  “Most space telescopes are placed in such orbits because that is the only way to get an un-interrupted line of site in every direction. If the telescopes were in earth orbit, then the earth itself would block a huge part of the line of sight of the telescope. And as far as being dangerous, it is no more likely to crash into earth than if it was in earth orbit. There is no friction in space, so its speed will not reduce for it to crash.” Jorge explained.

  “Ok, so we are watching from a telescope which is racing the earth 300 thousand Kilometers ahead of earth, so what?” asked Ramesh.

  “Ah, here comes the good news my friend. There is a very similar infrared telescope in a very similar orbit, but 350 thousand Kilometers behind the earth, trailing us. This nice telescope is owned by the US, and guess who the administrator of this particular one is?” Jorge asked with a smile.

  “Heidi!” exclaimed Ramesh.

  “Exactly. Now normally the total separation of 650 thousand KM, wouldn’t be enough to measure the distance to the star. We however think that this body is not very far away, not more than a few light years, otherwise such a faint object would not have been visible at all. At such short distances, this separation should be good enough. So let’s do it.” Jorge finished.

  Jorge was due any way to report to Herman and Heidi, so he quickly wrote a short note, attached the data and screen shots from their screen and sent to both of them. Then he immediately called up Heidi. After the congratulations showered, Jorge explained his plan with the request for immediate observation on the telescope.

  He had not expected Heidi to refuse, and she didn’t. Heidi would in fact order all her available assets to immediately turn their eyes on that object in every possible wavelength of the EM spectrum. If it is visible in other lights, then they could get more information, like what is its chemical composition, what is the size? Is it emitting radio waves?

  Within half an hour of their conversation, the entire team of scientist, bureaucrats, senators and military men, who formed the emergency response team of the president were aware, that the possible home planet of the aliens may have been identified. It had sent excited ripples across the entire government machinery.

  The data from Heidi’s telescope did not need to accumulate for a long time. They didn’t need a clear image from the second telescope. All they needed was the angle of visibility, which could be determined by the computer with even half a percent increase in brightness from the surroundings.

  They had the data fairly quickly, and Jorge fed that data into a standard parallax program. The answer stunned him. The screen showed the figure in three different units. First one was in meters as is the scientific convention, and the figure was 2.25 x 1015 m. That in layman’s term is basically 2.25 trillion kilometers.

  The second one was in Astronomical Units or AU, which was a convention used by astronomers. One AU is the distance of the earth from the sun, and the figure was 14,900 AU. The third unit was light years. This was a convenient unit used by both astronomers as well as laymen, it was the distance light traveled in one year. The figure was 0.236 light year, so it was less than a quarter light year from earth!

  Damn the alien world is so close to earth. Jorge realized, now that he knew the distance to the home world, he could quickly calculate the size of the star, given its apparent size from earth. However what excited him even more, was that this thing was within the influence of the sun! It was well within the Oort cloud, at its inner edge.

  It must be orbiting the sun, albeit very slowly given the great distance! He could calculate its orbit. If he could calculate the orbit, then he can find out when it was at the exact point from where the alien ship was launched. If he knew that then he knew exactly how much time it had taken the alien ship to travel to earth!

  These were standard astronomy calculations, and needed no new programming, standard applications were available to do these calculations. They quickly input the numbers, and out came the answer – nearly 39 years!

  This thing had been launched when none of them had been born, and President Bill Clinton was in his first term! They were so stunned with the amount of time the alien ship had been traveling, that they almost ignored the other data that was also competing for their attention. The program had calculated the size of body. It wasn’t that unexpected. It was about the diameter of Jupiter, a few percent smaller.

  Gas giants don’t bloat in size as they become heavier, they simply compress and become denser. Jupiter for example is four times the mass of Saturn, and yet is only slightly larger than Saturn in diameter. All the extra mass of Jupiter compressed on itself to make it denser. Finding the mass of the planet was going to be trickier, but from Jorge’s experience as an astrophysicist, the mass of the planet was probably lower than Jupiter but higher than Saturn.

  Jorge now realized why this planet had never been found before. At a distance of a quarter light year, it could not be detected with sun’s reflected light. It could only be detected with the heat it was giving off like all gas giants do, due to the enormous pressure at their core, which compresses hydrogen into a weird liquid metallic state.

  The infrared telescopes were sensitive enough to detect temperatures given off by gas giants just about the size of Jupiter. If the mass was a bit lower, then the gas giant temperature was not hot enough for it to be detected on human infrared telescopes. This planet must be just below our IR telescopes’ detection threshold.

  It was then Jorge wrote his famous note, signed jointly by him and Ramesh to Heidi, Herman, Oleg and various colleagues in the Astrophysics staff at their college and colleagues. It would spread like wildfire through the internet, and is now archived on various sites as a historically significant message.

  ‘The alien home world has been identified (preliminary images and data attached). It is not some far off exotic star, but on a newly discovered and now the 9th planet of the sun in our own solar system! We will have to expand the definition and boundaries of our solar system to include this planet a quarter light year away in the Oort cloud. The planet is a gas giant slightly smaller than Jupiter in diameter. Its mass has yet to be determined, but it would be lower than Jupiter but probably higher than Saturn. The aliens probably originate from a moon orbiting this gas giant. The moon itself being too far and too small is not observable yet. We have named this 9th planet of the sun as Shaitan.’

  Chapter 15

  Declaration of war

  It was a few cycles after the loss of signal from the scout vessel, that Harmony was summoned to the council of seers. Not via a tasting station, but to be physically present in the chamber. Why does the council bother to do that he wondered. Not that one would mingle with the seer’s council physically in the chamber.

  The council sat on individual tasting stations and mingled virtually, so why did they bother to summon him physically? For that matter, why do they bother t
o come to the chamber physically, when all they do is sit on their tasting stations and mingle virtually? Tradition I guess. He did not think much about these old seers and their traditions, but what could he do?

  He did as was commanded by the council, so with an odor that signified a sigh, he proceeded to take a transport from his nest to the nest-of-nests. Thankfully it was close and he would not have to leave underground and go over land or in orbit.

  When he was finally ushered into the chambers after a long wait at the doors of the council, it was already in session, and he could sense odors indicating much debate, discussions and arguments had already taken place. He was directed not towards a visitor’s niche, but towards the open floor at the center of the chamber.

  The floor was meant for physical mingling in the ages past, when seers would confabulate the way his beings were meant to since ancient times, without technology. The floor was not really needed any longer, but it was there as a tradition, or during those rare rituals that could only be done physically mingling as tradition dictated.

  In the center of the floor he noticed there was a temporary tasting station placed and a being standing next to it, already touching on it. He did not recognize the being, but went and settled next to him. The being reached out and touched him, communicating to him, that he is also expected to use the tasting station.

  He introduced himself as Scent of Carnage, an elder warrior and Warmaster. Harmony did as he was directed and touched the tasting station. He realized that the station was in one way communication mode, also known as data mode.

  While it was primarily used for sending data, Harmony suspected that its purpose right now was more formal, ceremonial or procedural. There was no need to send data to Harmony by the council right now.