Exceeding the Limit

“There are three interesting things about NGC 5907 – the Splinter Galaxy,” said Max.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?” I asked.

We had cruised to rest in a vast interstellar region towards the outskirts of the Splinter Galaxy, just inside the circling dust and smoke lanes. A galactic park, in effect, where it was quiet, the stars were pinpoint lights, and a few asteroids drifted by on their way through, orbiting around to chat with the locals about mutual friends and radiation flux back in the old country.

“Well, for one, it's a relatively quiet neighborhood!”

“Yes. I can see that.”

The splinter galaxy is largely occupied by dwarf stars. There aren’t many giant stars, any big violent bruisers, in the Splinter Galaxy. It’s kind of a residential retirement community. These dwarf stars are conservative – little “c” – burning their hydrogen and helium nuclear energy slowly. They aren’t overly luminous, and thus they will persist for a relatively long time. Long in comic time. Compared to giant stars that are burning their candles at both ends, wearing themselves out as a transient YouTube influencer of the Universe.

Such giant stars eventually deplete their energy sources, collapse, explode as a supernova, and release dust and gasses and heavier atoms, which can condense and initiate the formation of new stars. The last supernova we know of in the Splinter Galaxy, in the past 100 years, occurred in 1940. Without very many of these Hollywood reality show disintegrations, star formation is modest in the Splinter Galaxy.

“That’s pretty cool,” I said. “And the second interesting thing?”

“Ah!” said Max, “Secondly, NGC 5907 is a little warped.”

“Well, that’s not nice to say!”

“No, no. Physically warped. Bent. Wobbly.”

NGC 5907 is, indeed, a bit warped. A bit wobbly. Our Milky Way is also warped and wobbling, probably for the same reason. Astronomers suspect that once upon a time a smaller dwarf galaxy crashed into the Splinter and set it vibrating like a gigantic crash cymbal. Like smacking the rim of a galactic Frisbee. Shooting a shotgun through a dish of Jello. Like blowing a smoke ring, the galaxy, and then blowing another dollop of smoke right through its edge.

“Max. Enough! We get the idea.”

Evidence of the crash can be found in a stellar ring looping far out around the galaxy, a stellar tidal stream, stars scattered out behind the speeding dwarf as it crashed out of control across the highway median of the Splinter and was pulled apart by the tidal forces of the larger galaxy.

Maybe there’s even a double stellar loop crash site. An international collaboration of amateur astronomers reported visualizing a double tidal stream in 2008. They published a beautiful image of multiple streams and, as of this writing, it is the feature illustration for the Wikipedia page dedicated to NGC 5907. They even simulated the orbital path of the putative satellite dwarf galaxy as it was ripped apart. A demonstration of feasibility.

I’m rooting for them! But that report has been challenged, as happens, is expected, and is proper in any robust scientific discipline. First one, and then a second, professional astronomy group tried and failed to confirm the complex tidal streams. In the end, they could see only the one stellar stream originally reported. Astrophotography is complicated.

“You bet your sweet bippy!” said Max.

Have I mentioned Max conjures up ancient cultural artifacts at random?

“And so what’s the third interesting feature?” I asked.

“The third … Uh oh! ... Not now, Smitty!”

It was a massive show of force.

“Well, shit!” said Max, nervously checking the control panel. “Trouble.”

“What!?”

“Interstellar Celestial Enforcement.”

“ICE?”

“ICE!” Max confirmed.

“Well … Probably. Who can tell for sure,” he added.

They were arrayed across the higher perimeter of the park. Over a hundred federal and local agents in unlabeled tactical gunships with open lasers and shields up. They were moving across the area in a line, headed directly towards us.

“But we’re legal!”

Max began to giggle.

“Max!? What the hell are you laughing about. This looks serious!”

“Oh, it is,” he said. “But look closer. It’s all make believe. See? They’re all lodged there in their “Star Wars” look-alike buzz ships. It’s like they were pretending to be cowboys on horseback. Like British Red Shirts marching in lines across the commons in Lexington and Concord.”

“Let’s see now … Yup. And there they are! The Ministry of Information scribes, embedded with the thugs, recording everything and streaming it live – like a reality TV show. Susie Wiles would be so proud!”

“Still, they’re pretty scary,” I said.

“Check it out. It’s almost all surplus from the last Galactic Forever War. Impressive junk the regime sells at a “discount” to local sheriffs’ departments. Giant six-foot rubber four-wheel traction lug-tire war machines. On a starship! They need cranes just to lift the troops into the things.”

“It is worthless overkill for local enforcement, of course, and the stuff costs them more to maintain than anyone can afford. The government is glad to get it off the books. A lot of it rots -- sooner rather than later. But it lets ICE affiliates pretend they are big fancy powerful all-purpose military enforcers. Whoo-Ha! And they think these things look intimidating parked near a reflecting pool by a Mall. And in times like these it’s an excuse to drag it out for public displays of shock and awe,”

“Frankly, I’ve never understood the ‘Shock and Awe’ strategy,” I said. “If I were fighting to defend my solar system, my way of life, my freedom, no amount of Shock and Awe would serve to stop me.”

“Exactly,” said Max. “It’s never worked. It didn’t work in Iraq, and it won’t work here. My theory is that the Shock and Awe crowd believe in it because it reflects how they themselves would behave. Without principles or convictions, when the Martians show up the Shock and Awe Boys are at the head of the line to surrender to ‘overwhelming force.’ And so they think you would too. That everybody would.”

“Uh, Max ...”

The ICE lines were getting closer. Some stray laser beams flashed by.

“Okay,” said Max. “I want you to concentrate on daisies.”

“Daisies!? Are you crazy?”

“Look! When I open this communications channel, they’re going to be able to sense everything going on inside our little aperture. Right down to your thoughts. And they can patch that into a massive database pooled from the quantum computers in every Galactic Department, thanks to Elon.”

“They’ve been after me for eons. Ever since that Supernova Incident. But they don’t know you from a stalactite. Let's keep it that way.”

So I tried to think about daisies.

“Max, my old buddy! How nice. What a pleasant surprise! It is so distasteful to find you!”

The voice was a strange collection of wavelengths. Not Dalek, exactly, Classier than that. Not fake USWS “weather forecaster” synthetic, either. Not quite sounding Scottish enough for that. More authoritative than Siri or Alexa. It had a seeping penetration as if it were telepathy as much as audio.

“Commodore! Long light years, no see. The distaste is all mine,” said Max. “I see you are exceeding the limits of your authority again. You can’t militarize this precinct without the request of the locally elected Regent.”

“Limits are meant to be broken,” sneered the Commodore. “It’s an emergency, Max. Haven’t you heard? This precinct is a Hell Hole, by Executive Order."

“Yes, yes, I see,” said Max. “Quite the hellhole. The two asteroids are truly terrifying.”

“I regret I must abbreviate the chit-chat, Max, as much as I would enjoy a good debate on galactic politics. You are under arrest for deportation.”

“Oh, fun!” said Max. “Where are we going? Alligator Alcatraz?”

“Max! You cut me to the quick! Would you put us in the same pathetic, unimaginative category as DeSantis, Noem, and Trump?! Cages in tents!? Bah! Those fools haven’t progressed past the B-grade horror films of the 1950s.”

“No, no, no,” the Commodore continued. “We were thinking more along the lines of a nice permanent vacation alone on a Brown Dwarf in the desert of an inhospitable exo-solar system.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Commodore. No alligators?” said Max. “Well, I’m sorry to be the party-pooper, but as Grocho once sang, ‘I must be going!'”

As he closed the channel he shouted, “Come and get me, Suckers! Your mother wears Army boots!”

And with that, he cranked up the gain on our little telescope’s astrocamera, steering us straight for the smoke.

“Max? ...”

“Not now, Smitty. We’ve got a fire hose to catch.”

The advantage of our little telescope is that it is quick and agile. Unlike the Super Gigantic Ultra-Wide Massive Telescopes (SGUWMT) of the Cosmos Regime, our rig is portable and easily relocated to any old dark sky location at a moments notice. So we had an initial advantage over the Commodore, and Max made the most of it. Soon we were cruising through the Splinter’s outer smoke bands.

“I don’t think we’re going to make it, Max. I can’t see a thing!”

“Faith, Smitty. We have physics on our side.”

“This will slow ‘em down," he said. "The big lunks can’t go plowing through this debris field like we can, and they’ll have trouble tracking us. Our little 12V battery emits barely any more energy than the dust itself. So they can’t separate our signal from the noise of the dust, especially with their ancient old IR detectors.”

“I hope you know where you’re going!”

“Hmmm...”

So on we flew. Blind.

“Yikes! Good Lord, Max! What the hell is that!”

As we came through the outer edges of the dust and smoke, a massive glow lit up the horizon. A small, blinding sphere at its center churned and roiled like boiling water. Beams of energy from the sphere swept across the sky, rotating like a lighthouse; beams visible largely by the rush of objects swept along in its wind. Compounding the vertigo, the lighthouse source was itself orbiting around a second huge mass of a star.

“That,” said Max, “is the third interesting thing about NGC 5907. I present to you: ULX-1.”

NGC 5907 ULX-1 is an extreme ultra-luminous X-ray pulsar. The source is a neutron star, which formed when the core of a massive star, 1 to 3 times the mass of our Sun, collapsed. This mashed all its protons and electrons into neutrons, creating another of the densest known objects in the universe.

The neutron star driving ULX-1 emits high energy X-ray beams directed out along its magnetic poles. Here on Earth we are used to our global axis of rotation being more or less the same as our magnetic axis. That’s not true for ULX-1. Imagine Earth’s magnetic North being somewhere near Omaha, Nebraska. With high fructose corn syrup spurting out of the ground and shooting into the sky.

Because its axis of rotation does not align with its magnetic axis, ULX-1’s X-ray beams are swept around 360° with each rotation of the star, scanning the cosmos like a lighthouse. When this beam happens to intersect with Earth’s orbit, X-ray sensors detect the pulse. And when it comes around again, it pulses again. That’s a pulsar.

The banner image at the top of this post illustrates the mechanics of a pulsar. The image is from the terrific science education folks at the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA, in Greenbelt, MD. They’ve also produced an animation here that I highly recommend.

“I know, officially, this is not one of my sections,” interrupted Max, “but readers should know that Goddard is under attack from funding cuts initiated by DOGE, Elon Musk, and the Trump regime! All basic science missions, not to mention education, are at risk.”
“Don’t forget NIH and NSF, too!” I added.
“Yeah,” said Max. “Any and all signs of intelligent life on Earth, I guess.”

Theoretically, there should be an upper limit to how much energy a star can emit at steady state. It’s called the Eddington limit or Eddington luminosity. Although the details of the Eddington limit get into some pretty thick weeds, the general principle is straight-forward. Radiation is an outward force acting on a star, while gravity is an inward force. The Eddington limit defines the maximum amount of energy a star of a given mass can radiate without essentially evaporating. Blowing itself apart. The mathematics was worked out by Sir Arthur Eddington during the early 1920s and subsequently published in 1926 in his textbook The Internal Constitution of the Stars.

Well, ULX-1 laughs at your silly limit! It blows right through the Eddington luminosity like Lyndon Johnson driving on a Texas highway. It throws out X-ray energy 1000 times above the maximum that Eddington calculates any self-respecting neutron star should be capable of producing. ULX-1 emits as much energy in 1 second as our Sun emits over the course of almost 4 months. The neutron star driving ULX-1 should have had its license revoked and faded away long, long ago. Yet there it is. How can these “super-Eddington” objects exist when they shouldn’t?

“We don’t know for sure,” is probably the best current answer for those of us who are not astrophysicists, but theory is gaining on an answer, and I’ll leave it at that.

The ICE gunships emerged from the dust bank sooner than we expected. They had tracked us after all, old sensors or not, and were now attempting to surround us. Max pulled up as close as he could get to the neutron star, without being sucked in by its massive gravity, and then pointed us directly towards the attackers.

zzxFZZWjapp!

The X-ray beam flashed by off in the distance.

xzzzFZZwHJapp!!

Every 1.13 sec, to be precise, the rotational speed of that city-sized hunk of a neutron star. The heat was intense.

“Here she comes!” said Max. “Hold on tight!”

ZzzzPHZZfwAPPP!!

Max skidded our scope smack onto the surge of the X-ray beam, like a dry leaf caught on the face of a water jet gushing from a fire hose. I nodded to Max in recognition.

We started to accelerate.

“Whoa! How does it do that!?”

“Photonic pressure,” said Max. “Some of you Earth guys are actually experimenting with driving lightsails into interstellar space using laser beams. We’re just borrowing ULX-1 instead. And the best part is: we know it’s headed home.”

Now far back, in trying to wrap around and encircle us, half the ICE gunships got too close to the neutron star and were captured by its gravity. Ground up, shredded, and added to the accretion disk boiling around the core.

“Sad,” said Max. “They just didn’t have a clue about ULX-1. Mostly kids. They lowered the age limit to enlist, and then lured them in with obscene pay and signing bonus packages. They gave them 5 minutes of training and let them self-destruct. Warriors.”

“They never learn,” he continued. “Remember Kent State? You have to know the territory if you want to police it. Imagine sending intergalactic ICE troops into the Splinter Galaxy park? Where they’ve never been before! That would be like sending the South Carolina National Guard into Washington, D.C. Crazy, eh? Nothing good could come of it.”

We both exhaled, pressed into our seats by the continuing acceleration. And we watched the stars fly by.

“Max?”

“Okay, Smitty, what’s been bothering you?”

“Sewer rats, Max”

He look at me oddly. “What?”

“No daisies, Max. All I could think of was sewer rats.”

“Sewer rats?”

“Sewer rats.”

He broke into hysterical laughter.

“Bwahha! They’ll hate that!! Well done, Pal! Bwah!! That will grind their gears for eternity!”

We sang “46 Million Bottles of Beer on the Wall” all the way home.

I took down the telescope and stored it away before the rains came. Then I scooped up the night’s data storage and headed in for a cup of coffee before checking the images.

“Max? What Supernova Incident?”

The question hung there, slowly fading away. Like smoke drifting on the wind.