Friendship One

by BRBrony9

A Dying Giant

Iron, uranium, copper, zinc, thorium, magic ore and gems, nickel, cadmium. Plentiful fresh water, sunlight for solar power, wind and water for clean energy, masses of healthy farmland, technology, knowledge, wisdom, healthcare, education, security. Equis had everything a rapidly advancing civilization could possibly need to grow and thrive.

Everything except time.

The astronomers hadn't even noticed it. It was impossible; after all, the star in question was light years from the planet, ten to be precise, a nice and conveniently rounded number, easy for the public to remember. To remember exactly how far away death was from consuming them all.

It was the Princess of the Sun herself who had sensed the coming end. Attuned not just to her star, but through her divine magic, to every star in all the galaxies of the incomprehensibly vast universe, she could sense changes and problems. She was connected to every white dwarf, every red giant, every neutron star, at a fundamental level, like a particle linked and entangled at a quantum level with another, despite being separated by great distances (a concept that the astrophysicists had been eagerly studying in the preceding years, in the hope of being able to devise some means of interstellar communication). She could hear their solar heartbeats, hear the birthing pains of newly forming suns, the anguished cries of a dying giant.

Celestia knew something was amiss with the star known to Equestrian science as Sigma-225b. She had known it long before astronomy as a science was even conceived of, for the universe and the stars that dwelled within it operated on an almost incalculably vast timescale. The lifespan of ponykind, and even of their Alicorn rulers, was but a blip, a minuscule drop in an almost infinite river of time, compared to how long it took stars to form and grow. Sigma-225b had, for tens of thousands of years, been a sickly old thing, at the very end of its billion-year journey through the void which had seen it orbiting the galactic centre and slowly burning out all of its hydrogen fuel. Once that was exhausted, it had begun to consume helium.

That, in itself, was of no concern. The red giant was content to use up its reserves, for it had no other choice. It was a natural process in the life cycle of stars, happening in millions of places across the universe all at once. Sigma-225b's expansion into a supergiant had been the next evolutionary step, for as the star's core was compressed to greater and greater densities and temperatures, the outer layers expanded like a balloon, sucking in the extra heat being generated deep within the star. Once the helium was exhausted, the desperate star began to fuse anything it could find buried within its complex chemical makeup- carbon, beryllium, lithium, magnesium- to keep itself going.

But by then, Sigma-225b was on life support, burning up the very last of its precious fuel, for once it fused everything to iron, an element that required more energy to fuse than it would create in the process, there was nothing more that could be done. The star, with a diameter almost a thousand times that of Celestia's sun, was on the brink of death, unable to sustain itself, like a pony lost in a blizzard, forced to expend more calories searching for food than he could gain from consuming it. The end was inevitable, and had been for thousands of years. That was of no concern either.

Celestia had been aware of Sigma-225b's condition, and spared it no thought, just an unconscious knowledge deep in her mind, like that which concerned so many other billions of stars. The astrophysicists of Equestria were aware of its impending demise, too, for they studied the star in some depth as it was the closest red supergiant to Equis and of considerable interest as a result. They knew it was close to stellar death. But it was not the death of Sigma-225b which worried her. It was the manner in which it had chosen to die.

Devoid of fuel, burning the heaviest elements it could create, Sigma-225b's core grew denser and denser, until the pressures of gravity squeezing and squeezing upon it could no longer be balanced by the natural outward push of the degenerate matter at the heart of the star, which had always, up to now, been a natural quantum effect, keeping the star in relative equilibrium. Now, however, gravity was winning, crushing and crushing, choking the life out of the star until finally, one day, a sunny mid-week morning in Equestria, at a little past eleven, Sigma-225b collapsed in on itself completely.

Being ten light years from Equis, there was no way for astronomers to record the impossibly brilliant supernova that followed. It would take ten years for the light to reach their instruments, but when it did, ponies in the streets at night would theoretically be able to see it, up there among the billions of pinpricks in the heavens, burning brighter than the rest of the galaxy combined, more luminosity, more energy than almost anything else in the sky. The collapsing star threw off its gaseous shell in a monstrous explosion that produced more energy in a few seconds than Celestia's sun burned in an entire year. Despite the cataclysmic release of raw power, it was not enough to completely discard all of the former sun's mass. Many of the shattered remnants of matter began to fall back toward the core, drawn by the immense gravitational pull of what was rapidly imploding from a ball of extremely dense iron into a rip in the very fabric of space itself.

The collapsing core broke through the skein of reality, becoming so impossibly dense that it bent space around it, twisted it like a coiled spring or knotted rope, until it snapped, tearing a gash in existence, a place where the laws of science ceased to have any meaning, where gravity was so strong that time itself no longer functioned. Into this black hole fell the stellar remnants of Sigma-225b, and when they did so, they unleashed something terrible.

Through processes not entirely understood by pony science, the falling matter was hurled outward, annihilated by contact with the singularity and turned into a mighty burst of energy that covered the entire spectrum; microwaves, x-rays, visible light, and, in the largest quantities of all, gamma rays. Like a giant shotgun blast, the dead star fired a huge conical beam of radiation along its axis of rotation, and like the backblast from a rocket launcher, another answering jet was hurled in the opposite direction at the same time, blasting through the shattered remains of the outer layers of the star and heating the discarded gases until they fluoresced into a searingly brilliant light. This flash of energy and luminosity dwarfed even the supernova which had preceded it; it burned a hundred times brighter, and it cast off as much energy in its brief duration as Celestia's sun would produce during the entirety of its existence. Sigma-225b was no longer a star. It was a single point in space where physics broke down, and it was two gigantic beams of deadly radiation blasted outward at the speed of light.

And one of those beams was heading directly for Equis.

Comments

[Nova_Wings]

Good opening chapter, the line

Everything except time.

was a nice hook, defiantly want to see where this go's

[Booster Spice]

I think I will keep an eye on this.

First, the general surface blast sterilises everything approximately 20 light years out, and to Earth, Sirius is only 8.5 light years aay, approximately.

Second, the best model for the literal rocket blast of radiation is converging/diverging spacio magnetic fields, which Dyson has managed to appropiate with extensive marketing. Plasma magnetic field bottles with squeezed ends were used years before?

Trying to find the oldest research Ive seen into refreactive index variations in materials ass how to do even slight variations at high energies. That Sirius defence research again.

Still, they have no time, so its only what they can take. How many miles of material shielding would be required just for a point bunker? Then youre a sitting duck for the stellar masses of outflowing material?

[Scribblestick]

This is an excellent opening with a great hook, as Nova_Wings noted. I expected my interest to falter when you detailed the death of Sigma-225b, but the way you wrote it kept it interesting, and adds some nice context: We've known for a while something was wrong, and now, we have only 10 years to do something about it.

I'll be watching this one. Keep up the good work!

[BRBrony9]

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Thank you! Hope you'll enjoy the rest of the story too.