“Then something came our way, information on an accident concerning the James Webb Space Telescope. You’ve heard of that thing, right? The JWST is a giant telescope that was set up in orbit around the earth earlier this year. It’s a cutting-edge device designed to photograph objects in space from high up in orbit, reducing atmospheric pollution to a minimum. A research theme has been chosen for each year for the astronomers using the telescope. Every stage is carefully planned and monitored, and any usage outside of this mandate, any change of plan at all, would have to be for something very big indeed. This month, the telescope was scheduled to photograph a series of deep-space shots off the Big Dipper. But that wasn’t what happened.
“On the 13th of this month NASA suddenly announced that the telescope had begun to malfunction. They told the scientists working with the JWST that they would have to perform essential maintenance to fix the issue. Furthermore, all pictures taken by the JWST are publicly available on its website. Yet, all links to the public website have been down since NASA announced that the telescope was malfunctioning. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but get the feeling that this is all a bit fishy.”
“So you’re saying there’s a chance that the telescope captured something that the government or NASA doesn’t want the public to see?”
Isogai looked thoughtful. “That would be the result, perhaps. I think it’s more likely that NASA identified an emergency and commandeered the telescope to carry out their own observations. They made up the story of it malfunctioning and proceeded to override the planned agenda.”
“An emergency …” Kagayama stepped forward, butting into the conversation. “That’s what I’ve been talking about all this time!”
“Kagayama, shut up, all right?” Hashiba knew what Kagayama was going to say. He put a hand against the man’s chest and pushed him backwards. “Isogai, can you guess at the nature of the emergency?”
“Of course. The JWST isn’t the only telescope set up to photograph space. The National Observatory of Japan has a Subaru telescope set up at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The Subaru telescope has a direct fiber-optic connection with Mitaka here in Japan and sends its photographs directly to the national observatory. A friend of mine called Urushihara works there, so I asked him whether he had noticed anything out of the ordinary over the last few weeks. He came straight back to me asking me how I knew, what my source was! I evaded the question, but, well, take a look at this. The link to the Subaru telescope is still up and running.”
Isogai tapped a key and a beautiful image of a starry sky filled the screen. As far as Hashiba could tell, it looked normal.
“What you’re seeing is an image focused on the center of the Milky Way, looking out towards Sagittarius.”
The mention of the Milky Way always reminded Hashiba of the summer and the festival of Tanabata, when Hikoboshi and Orihime were said to be reunited among the stars. The Milky Way was a stage for romanticism and dreams, a celestial corridor of light.
At the same time, our solar system was just a tiny portion of the Milky Way galaxy, which consisted of over 200 billion stars and was shaped like a saucer with a swelled center. The radius spanned 100,000 light-years, and the center was 15,000 light-years thick. At the edges, where the solar system was located, the galaxy was 5,000 light-years thick. A photograph of the center of the Milky Way from earth revealed the central bulge of the galaxy from a flat perspective, overlaying innumerable numbers of stars atop one another. It was because of this dense overlap that the galaxy was named the Milky Way — a veritable river of stars.
Isogai enlarged part of the image on the screen and played through a series, explaining that they had been taken over one-hour intervals. He played through fourteen images and then stopped.
“So, what do you think?”
The first to answer was Hosokawa. “It grows darker over time?” Hashiba sat back, impressed by his cameraman’s ability to pick up on detail. The pictures did seem to darken somehow. It was as though each successive image revealed a gradual fading of the light of the Milky Way.
Isogai nodded silently. He proceeded to enlarge the image even further and replayed the fourteen slides. This time, it was clear what he wanted them to see.
“The stars are disappearing,” Kato whispered in a flat tone.
One star had gone blank, then another, and a third. The phenomenon was plainly visible. That was why the images seemed to grow darker over time. Isogai closed the window and continued to explain.
“As you saw, stars have begun to disappear around the area at the center of the Milky Way known as the bulge, an area around 50,000 light-years away. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that alone, stars are born and stars die. We’ve already observed and recorded the deaths of many stars as they burn out their own supplies of fuel. Our sun is a star, and in 5 billion years it too will burn out. The important difference here is the manner in which the stars are disappearing.
“There are essentially two ways for a star to die. Light stars, namely stars up to three times the size of our sun, first become red giants. They then become white dwarfs and die out slowly and quietly, without fanfare. Heavy stars, far larger than our sun, however, go supernova after becoming red giants, blazing out in a huge, showy explosion. We’ve been able to track such events from earth by observing the sudden disappearance of light that has, until that point, been constant in reaching us. In the case of a supernova, we would expect to detect the release of X-rays, gamma rays, and other forms of electromagnetic energy. We can, in other words, ascertain the mode of death through the use of radio telescopes. We can work out which of the two ways any given star met its demise.
“And here’s the problem. When the telescope in Hawaii attempted to record the electromagnetic emissions of the stars that had vanished, it didn’t find anything. Let me stress this: they were unable to find any emissions around the vanished stars. In other words, no one could hear the death cry of these stars.” Isogai looked as though he was listening for something and fell silent.
“So these stars died, but not in the way you would expect them to?”
“Exactly.”
“Then how?” Hashiba had to know the mechanism of the disappearance.
“All I can say is that they vanished. Quietly, suddenly. There’s no other way to explain it.”
The image on the computer had shown multiple stars disappearing as though the lights of the Milky Way were being switched off, one by one. If more and more stars continued to vanish, if they all did so without any trace of electromagnetic emissions, then it was clear that something out of the ordinary was happening. If it was strange to Hashiba, he couldn’t begin to imagine how strange it must be for the professionals.
Disappearing stars …
The possibilities of a link to the show were obvious to everyone. They had been investigating the disappearances of people around the Itoikawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line, here at the park, and had witnessed the sudden appearance of a huge crater. Now they were being told that the very stars that made up the Milky Way seemed to be vanishing as if they were being eroded away by the very darkness surrounding them. Could that be put to simple chance?