Well, here it is Whetsday again.
In the story, that is. We’ve finished off a full cycle from Whetsday to Whetsday. Speaking of which...
The planet Rask, where the story takes place, is tidally locked, like our moon, so that its orbit and rotation happen at the same rate. One side of the planet always faces the sun. Suns. Which you might think would make days on Rask last forever—nights, too, should you be on the less fortunate part of the planet. Rask is sort of like that. Jukal Plex, where Denny lives, rarely sees real darkness.
But it’s not as consistent, or as boring, as you might think. Rask is aimed at the gravitational center of a closely bound pair of stars. It’s a binary star system; one where the stars are so close they whip around each other in a matter of days.
One of those stars is a red dwarf. No, not like the British sci-fi show. A red dwarf star, an M type for those in the know on star naming. It’s a real, honest to Sagan star, no question about it, unlike your brown dwarf, only it’s small and rather cool, as stars go. In this case, the red dwarf star in the Rask system is about one-tenth the size of Earth’s sun. Red dwarfs are very common out there. Twenty of the thirty stars nearest our sun are red dwarfs.
The other star in the system is something completely different. It’s a white dwarf. It’s also tiny, but it wasn’t always that way. The white dwarf in the Rask system was once a yellow star, very much like (though slightly larger) than our sun. Several billion years ago, that star expanded to become a great red giant star, a star so big that it swallowed some of the inner planets of the system. Then it blew off it’s outer layers until the core of the star was all that remained. Now it’s an intense little ball of helium burning blue-white pressed down so that it’s about 100,000,000 times more dense than anything on Earth. It’s not really burning any more, not making with the fusion, so it’s gradually cooling down. Only it’ll take a few billion years before you notice.
Blowing off all that gas helped the whole Rask system to sort of “tighten up,” with planets spiraling down and the two stars spinning closer together. Just over ten billion years ago, most of the debris had been swept up, and things settled down. So… a binary star system, one red dwarf, one white dwarf. And just a single planet. The planet Rask. Which happens to fall in a livable zone for this odd couple. There are a few comets out there. A couple of lumps of rock or ice that orbited far enough out to miss the big show, and Rask wobbles enough on its axis that combined with the movement of the two stars you get some recognizable seasons. Still, it’s a neat little system. Very simple. Very… clean.
Not like our system. Our system is a helluva mess, let me tell you.
Better yet, let me tell you what happened next to Denny. Come on inside...
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