The Stars That Aren't Done Yet

The car had been quiet for a long time. Maya's dad was driving and her mom was asleep against the window, and the only light came from the dashboard and the stars, which out here, away from town, were ridiculous. There were too many of them. They had stopped being dots and started being a kind of weather.

"That one's dead," Maya said.

Soren turned his head. They were lying head to head across the back seat, feet pointing opposite ways. "Which one."

"I don't know which one. Statistically. Some of them. The light takes so long to get here that some of the stars we're looking at already burned out."

"That's the thing people always say," Soren said. "It's mostly not true, actually. Most of the stars you can see with your eyes are close. They're still there."

"Okay," Maya said, not annoyed. She liked when he ruined a good line, because he only ruined it with a better one. "So what happens to them. The close ones. The Sun."

"The Sun puffs up. Then it sort of sheds, like it throws off its outside, and what's left in the middle is this little hot core. A white dwarf." He said it the way you say a word you've been saving. "About the size of Earth. But heavy. A spoonful would weigh tons."

"Heavy and small and hot."

"Hot at first. That's the part I keep thinking about." Soren pulled his notebook off the floor and held it up against the window so the starlight fell on the page, though it was too dark to write. He held it anyway. "It doesn't burn anything anymore. It's done. There's no fire left. So it just sits there glowing because it's hot, like a horseshoe out of a fire."

"And then it cools off."

"And then it cools off," Soren agreed. "That's the whole rest of its life. Cooling."

Maya watched a satellite cut a slow straight line between the messy stars. "How long."

Soren was quiet. Then he said, "That's the part I couldn't believe when I read it. I thought I read it wrong."

"How long, Soren."

"Trillions of years. Not billions. Trillions. It cools so slowly that to actually go cold, all the way cold, dark, no glow at all, takes longer than." He stopped. "Longer than the universe has been alive. By a lot."

Maya sat up a little. Her dad glanced in the mirror and looked back at the road.

"Say that again."

"When a white dwarf finally goes completely dark, it's called a black dwarf. Cold. No light. No heat you could measure. Nothing coming off it at all."

"Right."

"There aren't any."

"There aren't any black dwarfs."

"Not one," Soren said. "Anywhere. The universe is about fourteen billion years old. The oldest white dwarfs out there have been cooling almost that whole time, and they're still glowing. They're not even close to done. To make a single black dwarf you'd need the universe to be way, way older than it is. So there has never been one. In the entire history of everything, there has never been even one black dwarf."

Maya lay back down. Head to head. She could feel him breathing on the other side of the seat.

"That's not a thing that hasn't happened yet," she said slowly. "Like, like a comet that's coming. This is a thing that can't have happened yet. The clock isn't long enough."

"Yeah."

"The universe is too young." She turned the words over. "I never once thought of the universe as young."

"It's the youngest it will ever be," Soren said. "Right now is the early part. We're in the early part."

The car went over a bump and Maya's mom shifted and slept on.

"Okay, wait," Maya said, and her voice had the quick edge it got when something was arriving. "All those stars up there. The white dwarfs in them, the dead cores. Every single one of them is still warm."

"Every one."

"There's no cold one anywhere to compare them to. So the first black dwarf, the actual first one, the first time in the whole universe a star core finally goes dark, that hasn't happened. That's in the future. That's so far in the future that." She lost the sentence. "How far."

Soren did the thing where he tried to make a number be a feeling. "Imagine the universe right now is one second old. One second. The first black dwarf shows up." He thought. "Days from now. In that scale. Days, while we've had one second."

"So nobody has ever seen one," Maya said. "And nobody ever will for basically forever. And the first one is still coming."

"Long after the last new star is born," Soren said. "Long after the galaxies drift apart and the sky goes empty and there's nothing left burning. After all of that. That's when the white dwarfs finally finish cooling. They're the last thing. They outlast everything."

Maya looked up at the impossible amount of stars and tried to feel the size of after. The little warm cores out there, glowing not because they were alive but because they had not finished dying. Patient past anything. Waiting on a clock that hadn't run long enough yet to have an answer.

"We're so early," she said again, quieter. It didn't make her feel small. It made her feel like she'd walked into a room before the lights were even all on.

Soren turned his notebook over in his hands. He still hadn't written anything. There wasn't a way to.

"Dad," Maya said. "Can you pull over for a minute."

Her dad slowed and eased onto the gravel shoulder and cut the engine, and the dashboard light went out with it. The dark came up around them all the way to the edges.

Maya and Soren got out and stood on the cold road and tipped their heads back at every single warm thing in the sky that was not finished yet.