The Star That Isn't Old Enough Yet

The bus was forty minutes late, so Maya and Soren were the only two people left in the archive room, which smelled like warm dust and old carpet.

A screen in the corner was still running its slideshow, too tired to shut itself off. A photograph of a small blue-white dot sat glowing on it.

"That one's dead," Maya said, pointing.

"It's not dead. It says right there, white dwarf." Soren leaned in to read the label. "It's the leftover core of a star like the Sun. After the star runs out of fuel it sort of collapses down to something the size of Earth."

"The size of Earth," Maya said. "But heavy like a star?"

"A spoonful weighs as much as a truck. It's in the caption."

Maya was quiet, looking at the dot. "So it's a coal."

"A what?"

"Like when the campfire's done. The fire's out but the coal still glows. Nobody's feeding it anymore. It's just letting go of what it had." She tapped the glass. "That's not dead. That's cooling."

Soren picked up one of the printouts stacked by the monitor. Someone from the tour had left a whole packet behind. He flipped pages until he found a graph.

"Okay, you're right," he said. "It says a white dwarf doesn't make new energy. It just radiates away the heat it already has. Slowly."

"How slowly."

He ran his finger down the page and stopped. He read it twice.

"That can't be right," he said.

"What."

"It says trillions of years. To go completely cold. Trillions with a T."

Maya turned from the screen. "The universe isn't trillions of years old."

"No. It's about fourteen billion."

"Say that in the same units. Say billion like it's a small word."

Soren thought. "If the universe were one day old, right now, it's been alive since midnight and it's just past midnight. Like a second past. And the white dwarf needs the day to go on for years."

Maya sat down on the floor without deciding to. "So none of them have finished."

"None of what?"

"The coals. You said they cool until they go black. Until they don't glow at all. A black dwarf." She looked up at him. "Has one ever finished?"

Soren went back through the packet. He was slow about it, which Maya let him be, because she wanted the real answer and not a fast one.

"Here," he said finally. His voice had gone careful. "It says a black dwarf is what a white dwarf becomes when it's fully cooled. So cold it gives off nothing. No light. No heat you could measure."

"And?"

"And it says the universe is not old enough for a single one to exist yet." He looked up. "Not one. Anywhere. There isn't a single black dwarf in the whole universe."

Maya didn't say anything for a moment.

"Read it again," she said.

"Not one exists yet. There hasn't been enough time since the beginning of everything for even the first one to finish cooling."

"So they're all still glowing," Maya said slowly. "Every dead star's core that ever formed. Every single one is still warm. The oldest ones in the universe. They started cooling billions of years ago and they're still not done."

"They've barely started," Soren said. "Fourteen billion years and they've barely started."

Maya stood back up and went close to the screen, close enough that the blue-white dot blurred.

"Soren. There's a thing in the universe that has never happened yet."

"A lot of things haven't happened yet."

"No. Not like that." She was working it out with her hands holding an invisible ball and turning it. "There are things that haven't happened because nobody's built them or gone there. But this one can't happen yet. The universe hasn't been alive long enough. It's the right kind of thing. It's supposed to exist. It just hasn't had time."

Soren put the packet down. "There's a first black dwarf coming," he said. "Somewhere. Some particular white dwarf out there is going to be the first one that finishes."

"And it isn't finished."

"And it won't be for a while." He did the math out loud, quietly. "If a trillion is a thousand billion, and the universe is fourteen billion, then we're about one seventy-first of the way to the first one. Less. Way less than one percent."

Maya laughed, but not because it was funny.

"We're so early," she said. "Everybody thinks we're late. Like all the good stuff already happened and we missed it. The big bang, dinosaurs, whatever. But the coals haven't even gone out once."

"We're the beginning," Soren said, and he heard himself say it, and reached for his notebook.

He wrote on the page: the first black dwarf does not exist yet. Then under it: someone will be alive when the first star finishes cooling. Then he stopped, because that wasn't right either, and crossed out someone.

"What'd you cross out," Maya said.

"I wrote someone will be alive when the first one finishes. But nobody will. It's too far. There won't be people. There might not be anything."

Maya looked at the blue-white dot, still glowing on the tired screen, a leftover fire from a star that died before the Sun was born and was still, right now, this second, letting go of its heat one degree at a time into the dark.

"So it happens with nobody watching," she said.

"Maybe."

"The first black dwarf. The first time it ever happens in the whole history of everything. And there's no one there."

The slideshow clicked forward. The blue-white dot slid away and a new photo took its place, another dying core, another coal that had barely begun.

Maya reached over and clicked it back.

The dot returned, still glowing, and neither of them said anything, and the little light held on.