Supernova Rhythm
Andrew Fraknoi
Eve clicks her wrist strip, and Scriabin’s late piano sonatas play through her implants. It’s the Ruth Laredo version, recorded almost 200 years ago, but still one of the best. She likes listening to Scriabin while the processors are doing her analysis; the music takes her out of herself.
The deep-space Supernova Network Telescopes discovered a new supernova in NGC 6946 last night, and this additional measurement might be just what she needs to decide what’s happening with that galaxy and its strange run of exploding stars. Her biggest fear is that she is being distracted by a chance run among data points. Are the patterns she has been following really there or is it just wishful thinking on her part?
Eve’s father is a professor of pre-digital music and it was he who introduced her to the music of Scriabin after her mother died. She remembers winter evenings, next to their virtual fire, listening to pieces performed on period instruments, and talking about the Russian composer and his eccentric vision. Scriabin felt his mission was to combine music and light, to offer synesthetic experiences to audiences — all leading up to a world-shaking performance of a work of color and music that he called Mysterium. His hope was that the combination would transform human consciousness.
Scriabin would never live to complete the work or see it performed. She wonders, not for the first time, if his ideas have somehow infected her research.
NGC 6946 is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy, roughly 10 million light years away. From Earth’s vantage point, it’s seen face on, looking down on its huge disk of stars. It is somewhat veiled from our view by a dusty region of our own Milky Way, but the infrared light that the Network detects gets through the dust even when visible light doesn’t.
On average, a spiral galaxy like this is supposed to have only one or two stars explode as a supernova every century. But the supernova rate in NGC 6946 has been much greater ever since telescopes could observe it. And radio astronomers have reported an unusually large number of supernova remnants in the galaxy as well. Allowing glimpses even further into the galaxy’s past, their observations strongly hint that the rate of exploding stars has been high for much longer.
. . .
. Я вспомнил только еще одну такую, с очень похожим названием - "Great Science Fiction by Scientists" 1962 года выпуска. Там, конечно, были Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Chad Oliver ... В этой антологии нет столь знаменитых фантастов, авторы больше известны как ученые (в своих областях), но сборник получился интересный ...