The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

The picture became clearer only if one succeeded in assigning a source in another area to the radio signal.

Peter picked carefully through the catalog compiled by the WENSS researchers. In retrospect, they had not been able to assign a known object to every source, which was not unusual. For example, pulsars were only a few tens of kilometers in size and could therefore be noticed purely by their radio emission and not optically. To establish a celestial object’s true nature, it was not enough to look at it in a single wavelength range, as was commonly done in such assessments. One needed a complete spectrum of the object, which could be as definitive as a fingerprint. Then, depending on where its radiation had its highs and lows, one could conclude the physical nature of the object.

Where would he get the radio spectra of the stars that interested him? He would have to examine at least three of them more closely, and also perhaps the three yellow dwarfs from which he found no 325-Megahertz-source. Merely writing to some scientist would not help him now. Measurement time at the large radio telescopes was valuable, and researchers had to submit requests for them months in advance.

He knew this all too well from what Thomas, a fellow student from college, had told him. In those days, Thomas had done an internship at the Dutch ASTRON, which operated various telescopes. What might have become of him? Thomas had been downright enthusiastic about astronomy, far more so than Peter, who eventually decided on a career as a science teacher. He opened a Google search to look for him. Thomas... what was his last name? Schröter! Oh, the name was a common one. There were plumbers, horsemen, surgeons, computer scientists, even a soccer player. Okay, this one must be him: a Thomas Schröter at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn.

He was about to write him an e-mail, but the personnel list even included his extension number. Wouldn’t it be easier to explain everything to Thomas on the phone? True, he’d be surprised that he hadn’t gotten in touch for so long. But if his interest in science was even half of what it was back then, Thomas would listen to him.

Peter dialed the number. It rang, but no one was there. He was about to hang up when a man answered.

“Schröter here. What’s up?”

He remembered Thomas’s voice as being higher, but then they had still been young fellows. Like himself, he must have passed the age of 50 by now.

“Hello Thomas, it’s Peter.”

“Peter?”

“Peter Kraemer.”

“Oh, that Peter! I haven’t heard from you in such a long time. What are you up to?”

“I’m a high school teacher near Munich.”

“I ended up at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy.”

“So, should I call you Professor?”

“No, I never applied for a professorship. That would have required me to teach classes. I prefer to use my time for science.”

They brought each other up to date. Thomas had been at the institute for more than ten years and preferred to do field research and measurements, while he didn’t enjoy evaluating them as much. At one point he’d started working on his advanced degree, but then gave it up again.

“I just love standing at the meter,” he said. “But now out with it. How did I get this honor?”

With Thomas, he didn’t have to beat around the bush. “I need measurements,” Peter explained, “and that means radio spectrograms of two or three yellow dwarfs.”

“How come?” asked Thomas.

He explained his observations to him, and what he had already achieved through Holinger.

“You’re crazy,” Thomas said.

“Hmm.”

“But crazy in a good way. Honestly, only an amateur like you could come up with ideas like that.”

“Oh. That bad?”

“Honestly? Yes.”

“All right, thank you for your honest opinion. It was nice talking to you.”

“Slow down, Peter. I like crazy ideas and can understand yours very well. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation or the first pulsars also were put down to crazy ideas at first. It can be worthwhile to keep at it.”

“You’re saying that just to comfort me.”

“On the contrary. We have the Effelsberg radio telescope here at the institute, a 100-meter dish.”

“Can we get observation time there?”

“Unfortunately, that’s hopeless. The most recent application deadline was Feb. 5, and the next one isn’t until June 6. You’d have to fill out an application, which would then be considered by a committee. If you got through, you’d then have observation time in a year.”

“If.”

“Exactly. The committee doesn’t necessarily like crazy ideas.”

“So that’s it, then.”

“Absolutely not. I just looked at the observation schedule for this week. There’s nothing but a test program reserved from three to seven p.m. tomorrow, so I could sneak us in before or after.”

“Won’t you get in trouble for that?”

“No, I’m assisting some students with their projects, and as a result I’m allowed to use such off-peak times. Of course, something can always come up, but nothing should happen before tomorrow. What do you think about 1 p.m.? I’m sure we’ll be done by three.”

“But I can’t make it to Bonn by 1 p.m.”

“You don’t have to. The radio telescope can be controlled from all over the world. I’ll give you a login, and we’ll go searching together. What frequency did you say you were looking for?”

“325 megahertz.”

“Hmm, that reaches into the low-frequency range on one side. I’d have to recommend our LOFAR. But getting slots there on short notice is pretty much impossible.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Thomas.”

“The radio telescope can give you data between 300 megahertz and 95 gigahertz, but not below 300 megahertz. So the spectrum we gain is cut off on the left. It doesn’t start at zero.”

“I can live with that. The main thing is that I get the data.”

“We also won’t be able to drive more than two objects. To get beyond 900 megahertz, I have to change receivers.”

“You have to put on a different lens, you mean, like you’d do with a telescope?”

“More likely it’s