The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  February 23, 2026 – Passau

  The answer from the editor reached him much sooner than he’d expected. He had to turn to the stack of class test papers. He had promised the 10th-grade B-section students that he would announce their grades tomorrow. They’d already written the work before the winter break.

  But the ‘pling’ was clear. He had a new message from an unknown sender in his spam-protected inbox. That could only have come from SPACE. At least that was what his gut told him. It was better to find out right away than to be distracted the whole time he was grading the classwork.

  It was undoubtedly, at the very least, an acknowledgment of receipt. The editorial department had more to do than answer curious high school teachers. Peter pushed the stack of papers aside and opened the notebook. The e-mail jumped out at him.

  “Re: Can stars like the sun just go out?”

  The sender was Wolfgang Koser, editor-in-chief of the magazine.

  “Dear Mr. Krämer,” he wrote.

  Peter didn’t hold it against people when they misspelled his last name. It was usually just a case of the spell checker doing its thing.

  “You’ve asked a fascinating question there. In fact, a few years ago, astronomers noticed discrepancies between images of the sky taken twenty years or more apart. At the time, it looked very much as if stars had simply disappeared, and as you write, main sequence stars that had a few billion years left to go. However, after a multiple, thorough analysis, there remained no losses in the end that could not be explained in a natural way. My colleague, Matthias Matting, wrote a four-page article about this two years ago. It appeared in issue 1/2024. According to my information, you have been a subscriber for some time. However, I am attaching a copy of the article for you. Then you don’t have to search your archives. With best regards, Wolfgang Koser.”

  Peter nodded to himself. A nice man, this editor-in-chief. He had indeed subscribed to the magazine for a long time. But the fact that Koser had attached the relevant article directly to his reply... very customer-friendly. He reached to close the lid of his notebook. But, since this editor-in-chief had answered so quickly, he should at least thank him for it. That was the way it should be. He formulated a short e-mail praising the magazine and sent it off.

  Unfortunately, the pile of classwork had not become smaller in the meantime. But the man from SPACE had been so quick to send him the article. Wouldn’t it be rude to wait to read it tomorrow? Absolutely. Peter took a deep breath and opened the attachment.

  The headline read, ‘The Vanished Stars.’

  The text was illustrated with old photo plates and an artistic representation of a star. It was certainly not so easy to show something that was no longer supposed to be there. The text referred mainly to works by a team from Stockholm University, published in 2016, 2019, and 2023. A woman named Beatriz Villarroel always served as the lead author. The researchers compared sky photos from the 1950s and 1960s with more recent images. At first they found only one star that was still present in 1950 but had disappeared in 1992. However, several explanations for this came into consideration, which was why they repeated their search in much more extensive star catalogs. This time, 100 objects from the old catalogs were missing from the latest images. But the international research community was not impressed.

  Namely, the vanished stars had been slightly redder than average. Red dwarfs often tended to become suddenly active and emit flares, and if you photographed them just at that moment, they could appear to be gone the next. The comparison Matting, the author of the article, brought to this made sense to Peter: If you photograph a distant flashlight at night, and then its owner turns it off and you take a new photo, that is not proof that the flashlight has disappeared. It is possible it is just no longer bright enough to appear in the latter image.

  An exciting article. Peter closed the notebook and pushed it away. He felt sorry for the astronomers around Villarroel. It must have been a lot of work to match all those photo plates, only to find nothing in the end. The only problem was that it had nothing to do with his case. Sigma Draconis was not a red dwarf. It was a sun-like, yellow-orange glowing star that, at three billion years old was, also like the sun, still a main-sequence star. It showed changes in brightness due to sunspots, but it could not be turned on and off like a flashlight. Astronomers would also notice any red dwarf located at a distance of almost 20 light-years.

  Peter sighed and reached for the stack of papers. He had class tomorrow during the first period, and still had to prepare something. It was better for him to focus on his job now. But somehow he couldn’t shake the feeling that Villarroel and her colleagues had been looking in the wrong place. Maybe he’d have more success?

  February 25, 2026 – Passau

  Two dreary nights were behind him. Franziska had kept looking longingly at her weather app—when he couldn’t look at the stars, his mood was always a few degrees cooler than usual. Of course, his wife noticed this too, and then she took extra good care of him, which he couldn’t stand at all when he was in such a mood.

  All the better that clear weather was on tap for tonight. Today was Wednesday, which meant he didn’t have to go to school until third period tomorrow. So he could stare up at the night sky as long as he wanted, or rather, as long as he could stand the cold. Earlier, the thermometer at the bathroom window read minus two degrees, but the temperature was sure to drop. He took some chemical hand warmers with him just to be on the safe side.

  This time he’d put a folding chair in front of his telescope. He had also grabbed his daughter’s music stand, which she had left behind when she moved out a few years ago. It was crazy how time seemed to fly. He didn’t even remember what year that was. Now the music stand held the list he wanted to work from. He had replaced the lamp at the top of the rack with a red light so that he could read the text without sacrificing his visual adaptation.

  He didn’t have to look through the eyepiece because the tracking algorithm was supposed to do the work for him. Peter had gone to Wikipedia and selected a list of the nearest stars. First he deleted all red dwarfs, because they could deceive him with flares, and lie about their actual brightnesses. Then he deleted all giant stars, because they could have actually reached the ends of their lives.

  No, he wanted only quite ordinary, unremarkable stars, to which nothing happened under any circumstances. If a specimen from this category disappeared, no astronomer could persuade him that it was a natural process. Then there must be more behind it—not necessarily extraterrestrials, but at least something that science had yet to discover.

  However, the list had shrunk alarmingly after the deletion of the red dwarfs. He’d never realized that the sun was mainly surrounded by such dull twinklers. Nothing of this is noticeable in the night sky, because even a red dwarf appears as a bright point. That was why he used a second program, which gave him 100,000 stars from the immediate vicinity of the sun. From this a few thousand remained, because from his meadow he could observe only those stars that appeared in the northern winter sky. That had more than halved the list, again.

  Nevertheless, it could not be worked through in one evening. Peter expected it to take up to two weeks, depending on the weather. He wanted to get something out of it, too. When the telescope reached a star, he wanted to look at it and take pictures.

  His smartphone buzzed when the tracking arrived at the first star: Gliese 796 in the constellation of Capricorn, also called HD 196761. The star had not yet been given a proper name. In the telescope, it appeared as a bright dot.

  Peter was nevertheless impressed because he imagined the distance the light had traveled to reach his eye. It had taken 47 years, so he’d only been five years old when the photon he was observing started its journey from the surface of Gliese 796. Before that, it had struggled through the star for many thousands of years, being absorbed and emitted over and over again until, at last, it gained its freedom. Now it had accomplished its task by changing the structure of a rhodopsin
molecule in his eye in such a way that it had ultimately caused a signal cascade into his brain.

  He crossed off Gliese 796 from his list.

  February 26, 2026 – Passau

  “You want to go out there again tonight?” Franziska asked with her skeptical expression.

  Peter’s conscience awoke and he immediately felt guilty. But the weather was perfectly right, a stable area of high pressure, they’d said. But who knew how long it would remain stable at these latitudes?

  “I’m sure the viewing will be perfect tonight,” he said. “I’ve got this list to work off.” He waved the pages.

  “You also have a wife who might be feeling as if she’s being neglected.”

  She was still formulating in the subjunctive. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the movies, okay?” he offered. “There’s supposed to be a great Latin American flick playing at the Studio, I saw in The Weekly.”

  Franziska liked films with intellectual pretensions, and especially those that came from the Spanish-speaking world. “It’s bribery,” she replied. “But bribery works for me. You know that.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I just wish you would have let me know sooner. Then I would have arranged a date with Barbara today.”

  “Sorry. After all, we didn’t see each other this morning. And then—”

  “You have a phone, Peter. You’re holding it in your hand. It can be useful, not only to control telescopes remotely, but also for communicating.”

  Her tone was sharper than her words. She must be more upset than she admitted. Or was she jealous of his telescope?

  “You’re right. I’ll remember that next time. Speaking of the phone, haven’t you been meaning to call your friend in Hanover? Biggi, I think?”

  “Nice try, my dear. Now get out of here. I have a phone call to make... to Biggi.”

  He’d already reached the second page, and things were progressing quickly, mainly because he was looking through the eyepiece less and less frequently... When the tracking algorithm issued a success message, that was enough for him to tick off the star. Only particularly interesting specimens were not to be skipped.

  He was presently on the star HD 149026, which also carried the strange name of Ogma—supposedly a Celtic deity. Ogma had only landed on his list because the star was much bigger and brighter than the sun and belonged to the yellow subgiants. It had a planet, Smertrios, named after a Gallic god of war.

  Of course, none of this detail could be seen in his telescope. After all, Ogma was 250 light-years away from Earth. No terrestrial telescope in existence was capable of directly imaging planets at such a distance. But Peter had enough imagination. Smertrios circled its star in a very tight orbit that took only three days to complete. He imagined a Saturn that would be comparable in size but without rings, which could not survive in such a scenario. Smertrios would have to be heated up enormously by its star. Lots of heat meant lots of energy in the atmosphere and, therefore, lots of air movement. Sky watching must be terrible for an astronomically interested inhabitant of the planet.

  But life had no chance there anyway. The planet seemed to completely swallow all radiation. Therefore it must look virtually black from nearby. The clouds of vanadium and titanium oxide, which heated up to over 2,300 degrees and were carried by an atmosphere of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, certainly would contribute to this. It must be a truly hellish world. A real pity that he would never have a chance to see it with his own eyes.

  He accidentally bumped the telescope with his elbow, and HD 149026 bounced out of view. Time to check the star off the list, anyway, and look for the next one.

  The light in the bedroom had been off for a while. Franziska had gone to bed without wishing him good night—a bad sign. Biggi had probably convinced her that he didn’t care enough about her. Biggi didn’t like him, and he didn’t like her. It had been that way since they were all in college. She had advised Franziska not to meet him. He studies math. He can only be boring. Biggi, who had studied art and music just like Franziska, then got together with a ‘hot’ gym teacher who later dumped her with two-year-old twin girls. Now she probably didn’t begrudge someone having a happy relationship without the need for constant excitement.

  Peter started tracking the next star. Alpha Fornacis, about 46 light-years away, was a binary star system. If it suddenly disappeared, he would need a whole new theory for the mechanism behind it, because what could conjure away two stars at once? The system was quite low above the horizon, but the telescope captured it quickly. However, the instrument failed to separate the two binary objects. Alpha Fornacis A had gone through an exciting encounter when, 350,000 years ago, it came within 0.26 light-years of the white dwarf Nu Horologii. Whoever lived in the orbit of Alpha Fornacis must have experienced true comet showers at the time. For Earth, such an encounter would probably spell genuine catastrophe.

  Alpha Fornacis was the last object on this sheet. The line in which it was notated lay across a strut of the music stand. The pencil lead broke when Peter crossed out the star. Bummer. He’d only brought one writing implement with him, even though there were plenty in the kitchen. He turned the page. The next star on the list was 47 Ursae Majoris, a yellow dwarf in the constellation of Ursa Major, the ‘Great Bear.’ He programmed the tracker, started it up, and walked across the meadow toward the house.

  The closer he got to the house, the more quietly he moved. Franziska always slept with the bedroom window open and he didn’t want to wake her up. He took off his shoes outside the house, carefully opened the front door, and walked in stocking feet into the kitchen. He didn’t need light—his eyes were well adapted, and there were enough LEDs on technical devices to give off just enough brightness to outline things. What would the world look like if one could only perceive it by its outlines? The illusion of being able to see inside things or to see through the world would be gone, and with it the disappointment when, sometime after completing puberty, one realized how profound this illusion was.

  He fumbled around on the shelf and found a pen. To be on the safe side, he took an extra. He snuck out of the kitchen like a burglar. He hoped Franziska didn’t have to go to the bathroom right now. She never turned on the light at night when she had to, so she wouldn’t wake up completely. But he was lucky. There was no one in the hallway. He sensed the bathroom door was open by the lemon scent emanating from a perfume bottle in there.

  Just then his phone rang. Crap! He’d assigned a ringtone to the tracking error message. But that it would choose now of all times to go off—who could have guessed? Peter pressed wildly on the smartphone. Of course, in his haste, he hit the wrong buttons first. Alexa asked what she could do for him, it clicked as he took a screenshot, and only then did he manage to turn off the stupid ringing.

  Whew. He should have run outside instead of trying to tame the phone there in the hallway. Now it was too late. On the second floor, where the bedroom was, a door creaked. Alexa had awakened Franziska. Peter held his breath. Slow, shuffling footsteps started coming down the stairs. He opted to retreat. Outside, he put his shoes back on and ran to his telescope.

  Only then did he remember what the ringtone actually meant. You’re the unlucky one who woke Franziska up. Yes, that, but it meant the tracking algorithm had found a mistake. Which star was it? It must have been the top one on the new sheet, 47 Ursae Majoris, a kind of big brother of the sun because it was a bit more massive, a bit brighter, and a bit older than the sun. Peter called up its data. 47 Ursae Majoris bore the name of a crocodile king in Thai mythology, Chalawan, and had at least three planets. It could not be ruled out that an Earth-similar planet might be orbiting in its habitable zone. Therefore, radio messages had already been sent in its direction, twice, but they would not arrive until 2047 and 2049.

  Or maybe not at all, because it looked like Chalawan had ended its existence for some reason. Peter imagined what this would mean for the inhabitants of a planet. I
f the mass in the center of its orbit went away, there would be nothing left to force it to retain that orbit—much like when a hammer thrower lets go of the hammer, the planet would henceforth race through the universe alone at its former orbital speed. Maybe the 47 Ursae Majorids had gotten lucky, and their star would have hurled the planet toward our solar system. Then they could arrive here in a few thousand years.

  The likelihood of this fantasy was, of course, minuscule. It would be about as great as the chance that there was no mistake here. A star did not just up and disappear. Had he discovered something significant, or not? His telescope was hardly the most efficient. How, of all people, should he be the first to miss Chalawan and Alsafi? But maybe this was normal. The big star catalogs contained millions of objects. If two of them were missing, it would only be noticed when someone looked explicitly, for example, to answer astronomical questions about one or the other of the two stars.

  What would be a logical sequence of events? Chalawan or Alsafi could have fallen victim to a stellar explosion, perhaps by a hitherto-unknown companion that supplied the necessary mass. However, this would have had to take place a few years ago for the explosion cloud to have had enough time to dissipate again to the point where it was no longer visible in his telescope. This proposition could be checked out with a more powerful telescope, because some remnant would still be found at the place of the former star.

  That idea was countered by the argument that the two missing stars must have exploded some time ago, and without anyone noticing either’s change of brightness. But such stellar deaths were very interesting for researchers. That was why there were several worldwide search programs that scanned the sky for new light phenomena. They would have had to miss these two events.