The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction

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