Chapter 277. The Planetarium, Operation Hook Up: The Show. (5/5)
Amidst the darkness, in complete silence, the narrator’s voice resounded, “Haaaaaah. It seems we were a bit too eager and flew too close to the sun and our spacecraft was vaporized.”
With those final words, the room remained chillingly quiet for a full minute as everything we watched from beginning to end sank in.
After that minute of silence, the lights on the walls lit up and illuminated the room. The show... was over.
I let out the breath I’d been holding in.
It was quite an enjoyable experience. It was a shame there were so few shows. Creating such an immersive experience was by no means an easy task.
Words alone couldn’t possibly do it justice. Unless you saw it with your own eyes and experienced it with your body, you wouldn’t understand.
Sadly, these days, people just want a quick fix, junk food, something easy to digest. Stuff without any substance.
All the random little tidbits of background information the narrator interweaved through our voyage through space was stuff nobody really cared about. It was designed to be an educational show, but hardly anyone would remember or appreciate the time and effort the narrator took to speak about them.
What would be remembered were the most impactful visual scenes we saw today.
Well, there wasn’t much that could be done about it. That was human nature.
“This concludes today’s show. Does anyone have any questions they’d like to ask?” The narrator officially declared the end.
“Haaaaah. That was really good,” Alicia mumbled in my arms with the back of her head on my chest.
“Yeah, it was quite the trip.” I couldn’t help but agree. It had been so good that I’d completely forgotten all about what Zale and Izora had been up to.
The narrator answered questions from the audience for the next twenty minutes.
“Does anyone else have any further questions?” When the questions stopped rolling in, the narrator made one final call for questions.
Just when I thought there would be no more questions after thirty seconds of no one speaking up, someone seated on the opposite side of the room suddenly posed a question.
“Are there really only eight planets in our solar system?”
“Oh? Are you talking about Pluto being the ninth?”
“No. Ignoring Pluto, I’ve heard talks about a ‘Planet Nine’ in university recently. Could there still be undiscovered planets even now lurking somewhere hidden within our solar system?”
“Oh! That! Yes, yes. There has recently been a bit of commotion in the scientific research community among astronomers. The elusive phantom ninth planet that has evaded astronomers for years.”
“Just recently, a paper was published proposing a hypothetical massive planet that is five to ten times the mass of Earth with an elongated orbit 400 to 800 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. In other words, it would be 400 to 800 Astronomical Units away from the sun. This is a distance far beyond the Kuiper Belt that exists 30 to 55 AU out. Though... it may or may not be out there, there are no guarantees after all. However, the astronomers who recently published that paper are pretty convinced it exists.”
“In terms of their evidence, they found another dwarf planet, Sedna, located about three times farther out than Neptune outside the Kuiper Belt had deviations in its projected orbit around the sun. Sedna which sits between 76 to 90 AU takes about ten thousand years to complete an orbit around the sun.”
“Deviations in the expected orbit of Sedna alone would be far from enough evidence to suggest an undiscovered planet though. What really convinced the researchers was that Sedna was joined by six other objects that also showed peculiar deviations in their orbit.”
“Those six distant objects all follow elliptical orbits. The outermost points of their orbits are not static and move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates. So it is particularly surprising for all of them to be pulled in the same direction.”
“It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place. The odds of having that happen are something like one percent.”
“But what really hammered the nail in the coffin was that the orbits of these six objects were also found to all be tilted in the same way, pointing about thirty degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of this happening is about seven-thousandths of a percent. It’s something that shouldn't happen randomly.”
“Does that answer any questions you had about Planet Nine?”
“Yes. But, isn’t it possible that there are enough distant Kuiper Belt objects to exert the gravity needed to keep those objects clustered together?”
“The researchers also considered this possibility as well, but they found it would require the Kuiper Belt to have about one hundred times the mass we believe it has today which seems unlikely.”
“I see.”
The one who’d asked a question that led to such a long-winded answer was a woman. Though, it was quite an intriguing question.
The phantom planet haunting astronomers of this time. Since I had knowledge of the future, I was naturally aware of its existence.
I was still a bit surprised right now. Not because someone had asked about this hypothetical planet. Rather, it was the identity of the person who asked the question. I recognized her disguise and though she’d altered her voice, I could tell it was definitely Angela.
So that’s where she’d been hidden this entire time. She must have gotten here while I was busy with Izora in the coatroom. She hadn’t put her coat away and had it with her.
Did Angela actually have an interest in outer space or astronomy? Hmm, actually, it might make sense. For someone who wanted to become a star and reach for the sky, perhaps she had an interest in real stars and astronomy. It was a somewhat unexpected side to see.
I wonder if she took a first-year astronomy course as an elective in university for her degree or something. I didn’t know what courses she’d taken as I’d never asked. Well, there was another possibility. Numerical methods and analysis was a computer science course I’d taken in university. We had a lab one time where we modeled and simulated the solar system in Matlab. I guess it’s not impossible that she heard about planet nine in passing if she’d taken that sort of course as well.
Well putting that aside for now, how will things play out from here? Is there a way for me to make use of Angela in this situation? It was pretty inconvenient not having a method to contact her. If I did, I could have her stick around and claim I was able to make the next show if she wanted to stick around and see it with me.
By forcing her to stay after we exit, I’d be able to arrange an encounter between her and Izora while Zane was still around. If Zane became aware she was Angela, the famous celebrity, and that Izora got to befriend such a person while he was forced to leave with his class, Izora’s stock would definitely shoot up in Zane’s eyes.
That was my assessment of Zane’s character. He was someone who valued social status and Alicia’s outgoing personality. Alicia held a special sort of status in school that appealed to him and Angela’s outward personality when in front of cameras was comparable to Alicia’s.
Chapter 277. The Planetarium, Operation Hook Up: The Show. (5/5)
Amidst the darkness, in complete silence, the narrator’s voice resounded, “Haaaaaah. It seems we were a bit too eager and flew too close to the sun and our spacecraft was vaporized.”
With those final words, the room remained chillingly quiet for a full minute as everything we watched from beginning to end sank in.
After that minute of silence, the lights on the walls lit up and illuminated the room. The show... was over.
I let out the breath I’d been holding in.
It was quite an enjoyable experience. It was a shame there were so few shows. Creating such an immersive experience was by no means an easy task.
Words alone couldn’t possibly do it justice. Unless you saw it with your own eyes and experienced it with your body, you wouldn’t understand.
Sadly, these days, people just want a quick fix, junk food, something easy to digest. Stuff without any substance.
All the random little tidbits of background information the narrator interweaved through our voyage through space was stuff nobody really cared about. It was designed to be an educational show, but hardly anyone would remember or appreciate the time and effort the narrator took to speak about them.
What would be remembered were the most impactful visual scenes we saw today.
Well, there wasn’t much that could be done about it. That was human nature.
“This concludes today’s show. Does anyone have any questions they’d like to ask?” The narrator officially declared the end.
“Haaaaah. That was really good,” Alicia mumbled in my arms with the back of her head on my chest.
“Yeah, it was quite the trip.” I couldn’t help but agree. It had been so good that I’d completely forgotten all about what Zale and Izora had been up to.
The narrator answered questions from the audience for the next twenty minutes.
“Does anyone else have any further questions?” When the questions stopped rolling in, the narrator made one final call for questions.
Just when I thought there would be no more questions after thirty seconds of no one speaking up, someone seated on the opposite side of the room suddenly posed a question.
“Are there really only eight planets in our solar system?”
“Oh? Are you talking about Pluto being the ninth?”
“No. Ignoring Pluto, I’ve heard talks about a ‘Planet Nine’ in university recently. Could there still be undiscovered planets even now lurking somewhere hidden within our solar system?”
“Oh! That! Yes, yes. There has recently been a bit of commotion in the scientific research community among astronomers. The elusive phantom ninth planet that has evaded astronomers for years.”
“Just recently, a paper was published proposing a hypothetical massive planet that is five to ten times the mass of Earth with an elongated orbit 400 to 800 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. In other words, it would be 400 to 800 Astronomical Units away from the sun. This is a distance far beyond the Kuiper Belt that exists 30 to 55 AU out. Though... it may or may not be out there, there are no guarantees after all. However, the astronomers who recently published that paper are pretty convinced it exists.”
“In terms of their evidence, they found another dwarf planet, Sedna, located about three times farther out than Neptune outside the Kuiper Belt had deviations in its projected orbit around the sun. Sedna which sits between 76 to 90 AU takes about ten thousand years to complete an orbit around the sun.”
“Deviations in the expected orbit of Sedna alone would be far from enough evidence to suggest an undiscovered planet though. What really convinced the researchers was that Sedna was joined by six other objects that also showed peculiar deviations in their orbit.”
“Those six distant objects all follow elliptical orbits. The outermost points of their orbits are not static and move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates. So it is particularly surprising for all of them to be pulled in the same direction.”
“It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place. The odds of having that happen are something like one percent.”
“But what really hammered the nail in the coffin was that the orbits of these six objects were also found to all be tilted in the same way, pointing about thirty degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of this happening is about seven-thousandths of a percent. It’s something that shouldn't happen randomly.”
“Does that answer any questions you had about Planet Nine?”
“Yes. But, isn’t it possible that there are enough distant Kuiper Belt objects to exert the gravity needed to keep those objects clustered together?”
“The researchers also considered this possibility as well, but they found it would require the Kuiper Belt to have about one hundred times the mass we believe it has today which seems unlikely.”
“I see.”
The one who’d asked a question that led to such a long-winded answer was a woman. Though, it was quite an intriguing question.
The phantom planet haunting astronomers of this time. Since I had knowledge of the future, I was naturally aware of its existence.
I was still a bit surprised right now. Not because someone had asked about this hypothetical planet. Rather, it was the identity of the person who asked the question. I recognized her disguise and though she’d altered her voice, I could tell it was definitely Angela.
So that’s where she’d been hidden this entire time. She must have gotten here while I was busy with Izora in the coatroom. She hadn’t put her coat away and had it with her.
Did Angela actually have an interest in outer space or astronomy? Hmm, actually, it might make sense. For someone who wanted to become a star and reach for the sky, perhaps she had an interest in real stars and astronomy. It was a somewhat unexpected side to see.
I wonder if she took a first-year astronomy course as an elective in university for her degree or something. I didn’t know what courses she’d taken as I’d never asked. Well, there was another possibility. Numerical methods and analysis was a computer science course I’d taken in university. We had a lab one time where we modeled and simulated the solar system in Matlab. I guess it’s not impossible that she heard about planet nine in passing if she’d taken that sort of course as well.
Well putting that aside for now, how will things play out from here? Is there a way for me to make use of Angela in this situation? It was pretty inconvenient not having a method to contact her. If I did, I could have her stick around and claim I was able to make the next show if she wanted to stick around and see it with me.
By forcing her to stay after we exit, I’d be able to arrange an encounter between her and Izora while Zane was still around. If Zane became aware she was Angela, the famous celebrity, and that Izora got to befriend such a person while he was forced to leave with his class, Izora’s stock would definitely shoot up in Zane’s eyes.
That was my assessment of Zane’s character. He was someone who valued social status and Alicia’s outgoing personality. Alicia held a special sort of status in school that appealed to him and Angela’s outward personality when in front of cameras was comparable to Alicia’s.
