Journey
Copyright© 2015 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 8
"Keep in mind that the orbit of Jupiter would be inside some of the red supergiants," April said. "And that big stars have big planets. A couple of them have planets bigger than the star Rigel ... and those are some of the the inhabitable planets. Their gas giants are stars in waiting."
"Big?"
"It takes eight and a third minutes for light from Sol to reach earth. Some of these in the zone planets don't see the light generated from their stars until next year ... and that's the inhabitable ones. With these big stars, everything is to scale.
"Think of earth as a quarter and NML Cyngi is 721,875,000 times that big," suggested April. "Or ... the sun is 11 feet in diameter and Cyngi is three miles. These big ones don't last very long though ... Sol is 13 billion years old and expected to last maybe seven to nine billion more ... Cyngi might last four or five million before Nova and collapse into a yellow dwarf ... she may end up just like Sol ... we speculate that Sol was a supergiant before she collapsed."
(For those of you who like that sort of thing, I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NML_Cygni#/media File:Comparison_of_planets_and_stars_(sheet_by_sheet)_(Jan_2015_update).png/ It makes some VERY BIG things very small.) WIKIPEDIA leaves me speechless sometimes ... this is one of those times.
"Let's go visiting," suggested Gary. "We might get a feel for the place."
"Remember," said April. "We're still in the Milky Way. A great many galaxies have much bigger stars."
Gary said, "You said we weren't going to find anything suitable in our Local Galactic Neighborhood and probably nothing in the Vega Super Cluster."
"Doubtful," said April. "Let me make some calls."
"Calls?" asked Vee.
April laughed, "I've been hanging out with earthlings too damn long. Contact ... I'm gonna make contact."
She did. Nicest thing about the speed of thought is we were there before she finished her chat.
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