The Game Board
Blindsight describes Big Ben as an “Oasa Emitter”. Officially there’s no such label, but Yumiko Oasa has reported finding hitherto-undocumented infrared emitters[53], [54] — dimmer than brown dwarves, but possibly more common[55], [56] — ranging in mass from three to thirteen Jovian masses. My story needed something relatively local, large enough to sustain a superJovian magnetic field, but small and dim enough to plausibly avoid discovery for the next seventy or eighty years. Oasa’s emitters suit my needs reasonably well (notwithstanding some evident skepticism over whether they actually exist[57]).
Of course I had to extrapolate on the details, given how little is actually known about these beasts. To this end I pilfered data from a variety of sources on gas giants[58], [59], [60], [61], [62], [63], [64] and/or brown dwarves,[65], [66], [67], [68], [69], [70], [71], [72], [73], [74], [75] scaling up or down as appropriate. From a distance, the firing of Rorschach’s ultimate weapon looks an awful lot like the supermassive x-ray and radio flare recently seen erupting from a brown dwarf that should have been way too small to pull off such a trick.[76] That flare lasted twelve hours, was a good billions times as strong as anything Jupiter ever put out, and is thought to have resulted from a twisted magnetic field.[77]
Burns-Caulfield is based loosely on 2000 Cr105, a trans-Newtonian comet whose present orbit cannot be completely explained by the gravitational forces of presently-known objects in the solar system.[78]
53. Oasa, Y. et al. 1999. A deep near-infrared survey of the chamaeleon i dark cloud core. Astrophysical Journal 526: 336-343.
54. Normile, D. 2001. Cosmic misfits elude star-formation theories. Science 291: 1680.
55. Lucas, P.W., and P.F. Roche. 2000. A population of very young brown dwarfs and free-floating planets in Orion. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 314: 858-864.
56. Najita, J.R., G.P. Tiede, and J.S. Carr. 2000. From stars to superplanets: The low-mass initial mass function in the young cluster IC 348. Astrophysical Journal 541(Oct. 1):977-1003.
57. Matthews, Jaymie. 2005. Personal communication.
58. Liu, W., and Schultz, D.R. 1999. Jovian x-ray aurora and energetic oxygen ion precipitation. Astrophysical Journal 526:538-543.
59. Chen, P.V. 2001. Magnetic field on Jupiter. The Physics Factbook, http://hypertextbook.com/facts/.
60. Osorio, M.R.Z. et al. 2000. Discovery of Young, Isolated Planetary Mass Objects in the Orionis Star Cluster. Science 290: 103-106.
61. Lemley, B. 2002. Nuclear Planet. Discover 23(8).
63. Dulk, G.A., et al. 1997. Search for Cyclotron-maser Radio Emission from Extrasolar Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28-August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
64. Marley, M. et al. 1997. Model Visible and Near-infrared Spectra of Extrasolar Giant Planets. Abstracts of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, July 28-August 1, 1997, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
65. Boss, A. 2001. Formation of Planetary-Mass Objects by Protostellar Collapse and Fragmentation. Astrophys. J. 551: L167.
66. Low, C., and D. Lynden-Bell. 1976. The minimum Jeans mass or when fragmentation must stop. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 176: 367.
67. Jayawardhana, R. 2004. Unraveling Brown Dwarf Origins. Science 303: 322-323.
68. Fegley, B., and K. Lodders. 1996. Atmospheric Chemistry of the Brown Dwarf Gliese 229B: Thermochemical Equilibrium Predictions. Astrophys. J. 472: L37.
69. Lodders, K. 2004. Brown Dwarfs-Faint at Heart, Rich in Chemistry. Science 303: 323-324.
70. Adam Burgasser. 2002. June 1 edition of the Astrophysics Journal Letters.
71. Reid, I.N. 2002 Failed stars or overacheiving planets? Science 296: 2154-2155.
72. Gizis, J.E. 2001. Brown dwarfs (enhanced review) Online article supplementing Science 294: 801.
73. Clarke, S. 2003. Milky Way’s nearest neighbour revealed. NewScientist.com News Service, 04/11/03.
74. Basri, G. 2000. Observations of brown dwarfs. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys 38:485-519.
75. Tamura, M. et al. 1998. Isolated and Companion Young Brown Dwarfs in the Taurus and Chamaeleon Molecular Clouds. Science 282: 1095-1097.
76. Berger, E. 2001. Discovery of radio emission from the brown dwarf LP944-20. Nature 410: 338-340.
77. Anonymous, 2000. A brown dwarf solar flare. Science@Nasa, http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast12jul_1m.htm.
78. Schilling, G. 2001. Comet’s course hints at mystery planet. Science 292: 33.