The ploy worked. Professor Pike happily organised a field trip to the planetary nebula NGC4635. Mervyn observed from the science station while Loren drove. Cage warned the syndicates to keep in touch at all times, and not to disappear behind any star-fingers – dense, towering pillars of dust where stars formed. In these stellar nurseries, massive globules of space dust condense until they gained enough mass to ignite into bright new stars. Smaller dust clouds condense into rogue planets hurtling lifelessly through space until captured by a star or swallowed by the gravity well of a black hole.
Cage wanted his charges where he could keep an eye on them.
From a distance NGC4635 glowed like a multifaceted jewel -- shimmering with hues of blue, orange and red. The nebular had formed thousands of years before when a giant star came to the end of its life. As it died layer after layer of its outer surface pealed away -- each layer pulsating outwards as a bubble of unique elements. Eventually, the ancient star exploded, ripping apart the spheres of gas, and throwing trillions of tonnes of dust light years into space. The incredible force of the explosion compacted the very atoms of the old star’s core, forcing out every electron to form a new type of matter -- a neutron star. Unbelievably dense, the tiny new star glowed with a whiteness never achieved by its ancestor.
‘Think of the composition of rock,’ pike had enthused, holding an imaginary rock in her hands. ‘Although it seems solid enough if you stub your toe on a corner, inside its structure is made up of atoms. Each atom is made up of electrons whizzing round a central nucleus,’ she mixed her hands round an imaginary core. ‘Between the nucleus and the electrons is space -- lots of it. In fact, the main constituent of solid rock is empty space, though, I’m sure your toe wouldn’t agree,’ the class gave a ripple of laughter at her joke. ‘Now if you crush all the space out of your rock it would reduce to the size of a pin head. There would be no room for the electrons inside, so they would all be left running around on the outside trying to get in,’ Pike ran in a circle to the amusement of the class. ‘Now, there’s only one known way to crush out all the space from your rock, and that is to blow up a star. So let’s go and look at an exploded star -- our subject today is Planetary Nebular NGC4635.’
‘So what’s a black hole them, miss?’ Loren had asked.
‘A black hole, my dear, is just a very dense neutron star. So dense in fact that its electrons stand still. Even light cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. If we crushed our imaginary rock into a black hole it would be a thousand times smaller than a pin head. And to make one of those you need a very big explosion.’
As Mervyn examined the nebula, he could see how the neutron star’s light changed colour as it filtered through the different layers of super-heated gas. Each colour formed by unique elements. Giant clouds of dust shone eerily with reflected light or blacked out whole sectors of space. Most beautiful of all were the star fingers, glowing blue from within as new stars formed. Some stars were so established that their solar winds had already blown away the surrounding dust -- shredding the surrounding gas clouds into ragged streamers. Mervyn thought the scene starkly beautiful and as always he felt moved by the grandeur of the Galaxy. How could such destructive forces have such beauty?
As always, the magnetic and gravitational fields, and the spectrum of invisible radiation, which were normally hidden to view, showed on the view screens both separately and overlaid with the visuals.
‘NGC4635 is also known as the flower Nebula,’ Pike advised from within Cage’s sled. ‘Seen from a distance the overlapping bubbles of gas make it look like a beautiful flower.’
Suddenly there was a commotion behind him.
‘Argh. Get it off! Mervyn! Get this thing off me.’
Mervyn turned to see Loren frantically waving her arms as something buzzed noisily round her head. He recognised the Skitterbug.
‘Stay still, Loren, then it won’t bother you.’ With an effort Loren froze, following the flight of Skitter Bug with just her eyes. Mervyn unstrapped himself and drifted slowly over Loren’s head until he could reach out and snatch up the troublesome bug. From the other sled they could hear laughter.
‘Anyone seen my Skitterbug? I seem to have mislaid it somewhere,’ Tarun laughed over the biolink.
‘I suppose this is your idea of a joke, Tarun,’ Loren said. ‘Not funny!’ Loren’s fury brought more laughter. Mervyn had to agree with Tarun: Loren had looked well funny trying to fight off the Skitterbug. He stowed the struggling bug in an overhead locker and returned to the science station.
The sleds dived into the first gas layer. Mervyn watched as the outside temperature gage leaped up by a few hundred degrees -- the gases were superheated. Further in, closer to the neutron star, they would become hotter still, but the sleds were designed to withstand such extreme temperatures. The space outside glowed pale blue. Mervyn used the sled’s spectrometer to analyse the different colours and identify the elements in each bubble, but what he was really searching for was the tell-tale ion trail of a spybot.
‘Stay on this course, Loren. The trail heads straight into that globulus.’
Soon the sled was ploughing through a dark cloud of dust. Light from the neutron star filtered weakly through the swirling murk. It reminding him that only a thin wall of poly-vanadium, and the hull’s integrity field, kept the gaseous vacuum of space at bay. At these speeds each dust particle would be hitting the sled’s hull with the force of a meteor. The integrity field absorbed the impact and used the excess energy to charge up the fuel rods -- a neat eco-friendly design.
Mervyn concentrated on the x-ray display, which clearly showed the position of Aurora’s sled beside them. As usual, Tarun had wimped out of driving.
‘Aurora’s good at the driving and I’m good at the science stuff, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we,’ Tarun had said As a result Aurora got to indulge her love of speed to her heart’s content, while Mervyn had to share with another speed junkie: Loren.
‘Hey, what was that?’ Aurora called over the biolink. ‘I just saw something on the edge of my field.’