The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

locate.”
Too many details. He deleted everything except the salutation.
“Can stars that haven’t reached the end of their life cycle, main sequence stars like the sun or Sigma Draconis, just disappear? I am not talking about a supernova. I know that does not occur in a single star of this size. No, I’m wondering if such a star could just collapse on itself without us noticing anything from a great distance. I would be very glad for an answer. Best regards, Peter J. Kraemer.”
The spell checker turned the ‘ae’ into an ‘ä.’ He corrected the error. How many times had he tried to get such idiosyncrasies out of his computer?
‘Send.’
He leaned back. Now he felt better. He didn’t have an answer yet, but he felt he had set something in motion.

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Sbe jr ner bayl gur furyy naq gur yrns: gur terng qrngu gung rirelbar unf jvguva gurz, gung vf gur sehvg nebhaq juvpu rirelguvat eribyirf.


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