CHAPTER 15
ATLAS
A BETTER WAY
Atlas studied the data coming off the large telescope that was currently using the transit method to search for the Atua’s home world. They weren’t finding anything. None of the systems they were monitoring showed any obvious signs of biological life. At least nothing that couldn’t be explained by natural processes. He was at least hoping for a smoking gun.
The transit method involved waiting for a planet to cross in front of its host star. Then by analyzing how different frequencies of light were absorbed, the spectral lines, he could guestimate which gases were present in the atmosphere.
The trouble was, there wasn’t anything conclusive. Methane was just as easily created by alien life as it was by a volcano.
And what was worse, Ariana’s suggested solution was that they look at one of the stars, staring at it for five years, then move on to the next one.
The reason she suggested five years was to account for the fact that orbits in the Goldilocks zones of these stars might take up to two and a half years. So by keeping the telescope focused on the star for that long, they were almost guaranteed to see two moments in time where the planets transitioned in front of their stars.
That was not an ideal process, even if he constructed several telescopes to study them all at the same time. It would still take five years of constant study.
He could point the telescope at Sol for a hundred years and still have no conclusive evidence that it was a system full of life. Earth’s orbit just wasn’t at the right angle for them to see the planet using the transit method. Atlas needed a different way.
He racked his brain for potential ideas, trying to come up with a way around this issue.
“We’re not going to do what Ariana’s suggesting,” Atlas said almost instinctually. He didn’t quite have an idea yet but felt if he voiced the words out loud his mind would work in overtime to come up with a solution.
Ship cocked an eyebrow toward Atlas. “I’m guessing you have a better idea?”
Atlas bit his lower lip. He needed a way to look at the planets in those systems, not through analyzing the effects they made as light passed through their atmospheres. Somehow he needed to take a photo of each of the planets, as if he had the most powerful zoom lens ever invented. “If I needed to take a photo of a planet in another system, how would I do it?” Atlas wondered aloud.
Then a seed of an idea appeared in Atlas’s mind. He was finally getting back to his science roots.
He bit his lip some more, further developing the concept. He had everything in the system already to make what he needed. He became excited to tell Ship about his plan. And even more excited to tell Angelique, Trillion, Peter, and Icarus.
It was the kind of science fiction idea he would have obsessed about as a child.
The concept subconsciously appeared in his mind when Ship went on and on about how many resources they had in the system. They had enough resources to conduct megaproject after megaproject. And this was the ultimate megaproject.
Atlas needed to talk through his thinking. If for nothing else than to flesh out his concept. “Ship, how do telescopes work?”
Ship eyed him suspiciously. “The first telescope was basically like a magnifying glass. It worked using a lens to focus a big section of light onto a small area that people could look at.”
Atlas knew Ship was humouring him. Ship always played along as Atlas asked these questions. But Atlas also knew he’d piqued Ship’s curiosity; Ship wanted to know the idea that Atlas was presenting. “And what about telescopes today? How do they make bigger telescopes?”
“The telescope we have in this system is probably the biggest humans have ever made. Rather than using a lens, the telescope in this system uses giant mirrors to focus the light onto a small sensor.”
Trillion had constructed a massive telescope within the system. The James Webb Space Telescope was the first one designed in that manner. It had giant mirrors that reflected light. The limiting factor in that telescope’s design was the size of the rocket used to ferry it into space. Humans had built bigger ones once they’d gotten bigger rockets. The one Trillion had built was even bigger than any in orbit around Earth. “Okay, so what makes a telescope better? Ship, what is the most important factor that would allow us to zoom in on faraway planets?”
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“The aperture, the size of the lens, or the size of the mirrors. Basically the more light we can collect and focus onto a small area, the better the image and resolution we can gain.”
“Correct, so what if we wanted to build a bigger telescope? How would we do it?”
Ship scratched the back of his head. “I would argue this is the biggest theoretical telescope using mirrors. Hmm.” Ship considered everything for a second. His brain started to tick over thinking about potential solutions. “Maybe if we built even bigger mirrors, a wall of mirrors? Or maybe—” Ship paused. “I’m not sure how to do it. The designs of these telescopes start hitting against the laws of physics. We will struggle to make them much bigger.”
“Want me to give you a clue?”
Ship nodded.
“Gravitational lensing.”
Gravity bends light. Atlas remembered back to photos of weird images of space he’d looked at from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the images, distant galaxies would sometimes appear closer or distorted. He’d read a paper that said these were caused by the gravity within a galaxy in front of the objects the telescopes were looking at. If you were looking at a distant galaxy, and between you and the galaxy was a black hole, you could use the black hole as a telescope lens to take a closer look at the galaxy.
It didn’t matter whether light was bent through a lens, a mirror, or even through gravity. The more light you could bend, the farther away you could look. The benefit of using gravity rather than a mirror was, though there was a hard limit on how big you could make a mirror, there wasn’t a limit on gravity.
“Has Angelique invented something that can produce a massive amount of gravity?”
“No,” Atlas said. “Well, at least I don’t think she has. I’m talking about using the sun.”
The star at the center of the system they were in was the biggest gravitational body nearby. It was a red dwarf star, a relatively small star, as far as stars go. But by using the lensing effect that the star’s mass caused, he would essentially be able to see farther and at better resolution than anything he could possibly build.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ship said. “How do you plan on using the star in the middle of this system as a lens for a telescope?”
“So you agree that a big gravitational body like the star in this system will bend light?”
“Yes. But there’s a star in the way. If we made a giant see-through lens the size of the star, I’d understand how that would work because it’s transparent, but using the gravity from the star means there’s a massive star in the way.”
Oh, Atlas thought. Ship was thinking about it all the wrong way. “Do you know what an Einstein ring is?”
Atlas watched as Ship looked up the information. “It’s an image of light being stretched and bent into a ring because of the way space-time bends light. It looks like a solar eclipse back on Earth.”
“That’s exactly what it is. An Einstein ring is basically a magnified image of whatever is behind that large gravitational body but stretched out of shape so that it’s unrecognizable.”
“So you’re saying we could use the star to focus light from other distant ones?”
“I’m saying the sun is already focusing light from these distant star systems. We just have to send a telescope out there and start recording the data. The more data we collect, the higher the image resolution. In theory we could even create an image of the different planets in these star systems.”
“How do we go from an Einstein ring to a clear image of a planet?”
“I think Lex here can help. We just need to take a warped image and reconstruct it into what it actually looks like.”
The orb closest to Atlas flashed green.
Atlas continued. “Hopefully it’ll give us enough details to make out clouds and landmasses on the planet. We will probably also be able to see signs of a technological civilization—like artificial lights on the planet.”
“Why is this the first I’m hearing of this type of telescope? If it’s so powerful, why haven’t we built one before?”
“The trouble with this telescope is you can’t just point it at another star or planet when you’re done. It’s really only designed to look at one planet or star. So for the types of scans we’ve needed to do, it’s not practical.” Atlas paused for a second. “But if Ariana is right, then we only need to look at a handful of stars. We can use this approach for looking at a few stars and their planets.”
The team started work on designing small modular telescopes that could be manufactured quickly and launched out into space using the magnetic accelerators in the system.
In the end the design they settled on looked like a thin circular piece of board. In the very center was a camera sensor about one meter in diameter. Then the edges of the telescope were covered in solar panels.
They were disposable sensors that could be shot out in great numbers one after another.
It didn’t take too long before it looked like a train of these satellites were headed out away from the star.
Atlas also sent out a spacecraft, and eleph-ANTs with tractor beams attached collected all the telescopes after they’d completed their missions.
“Now we wait,” Atlas said as he contemplated increasing his playback speed. Although he knew he needed to use the time he had to figure out how best to parse the data the telescopes would collect.
At his core he was an engineer, a scientist, and a researcher. He preferred problem-solving. But crunching all the data he was about to collect required a slightly different skill set. Someone with machine learning capabilities. Someone who could design an algorithm for visualizing everything. Someone who could take datapoints in the shape of an Einstein ring and turn them into an image of a planet.