Astronomy 101
A/N: Sorry for the delay in posting. RL has gotten rather hectic lately. I do most of my reading/writing/editing and such over the weekends, but my weekends look pretty booked from now till the end of summer, so I can't guarantee a set posting schedule for awhile.
Chapter Seven - Astronomy 101
When Aragorn fell asleep that evening, he found himself in an open meadow, with a gently sloping hill in front of him. As with previous times, to find Lauren, all he had to do was follow the sounds of her music. Looking up the hill toward the sound, he saw Lauren sitting at the top with an unusual device standing nearby. He walked easily up the hill and sat down next to her on the blanket she had spread out on the ground. She gestured to the vista in front of them. "I've always loved watching the sunset." The sky was a glorious mixture of oranges, reds and pinks in one of the most beautiful sunsets Aragorn had ever seen.
Aragorn nodded in agreement after taking a long appreciative glance at the view, then gestured toward her radio. A song much like those he had heard before was emanating from the speakers, and she was swaying slightly back and forth to the beat. "Nearly every time I see you, you are listening to your music."
"I couldn't imagine living without music," she commented. "No matter what mood I'm in, I can find music to complement it or to contrast it. It has the power to calm me, excite me, or lift my spirits when I'm feeling down. Even when I'm not listening to it, I almost always have a song in my head." She leaned over and turned off the radio, knowing that Aragorn did not share her musical tastes.
"The love of music is a very elven trait," Aragorn commented. "Though I do not believe that most elves would consider what you listen to, to be music." The expression on his face very clearly showed his dislike of her music.
"I happen to like it," she retorted easily. "But speaking of elves, where is Legolas? I thought he had planned to join us tonight." She looked around them and peeked behind Aragorn as if she thought that he might be hiding behind his friend.
"So you know that he was truly here?" Aragorn asked her, chuckling at the thought that Legolas would simply be hiding behind him.
"I figured it out," Lauren said, turning her attention back to Aragorn. "Even if you know him really well, I don't think his reactions would have been quite so genuine if he weren't really here. I certainly hope I didn't scare him away."
Aragorn raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his chest. Legolas was a rather fearless warrior in battle. The thought that he would be scared of Lauren was rather amusing. "Scare him away?"
Lauren chuckled. "I don't mean that he's afraid of me, but you have to admit that he was rather uncomfortable around me. I don't know why, but he doesn't seem to know what to make of me." The look on her face was one of pure innocence.
Aragorn just gave her an incredulous look, and Lauren rolled her eyes. "O.K. He probably wouldn't have been so uncomfortable if I hadn't been staring at him like a starving man at a feast."
Aragorn started laughing, and Lauren joined him. "For some reason, I seem to find myself laughing rather frequently around you," he said as the laughter died down.
"I'm hoping that means you share my odd sense of humor and aren't just laughing because you don't know how to react to me." Her lips quirked in a wry grin as she looked at him.
"I think it is a little of both," Aragorn admitted, running a hand through his hair to push back a recalcitrant lock of hair that insisted on falling in his face.
"Fair enough," she said, waving a hand through the air. "But if you bring Legolas back, I promise I'll be good…or at least I'll try my hardest." Her eyes sparkled mischievously as she tried to hold an innocent expression on her face.
Aragorn shook his head a little. He did not quite trust the look on her face. "The reason he is not here has nothing to do with you. I wanted to make sure that he would not find himself on the beach again."
"Does he have something against the beach?" Lauren asked, wrinkling her forehead in confusion.
"No," Aragorn said. "But the sea calls to him in a way you and I can never understand. The elves are leaving Middle-earth to sail to Valinor. Legolas has felt the call to join them. He has sworn not to leave while I still walk the land, but that does not keep him from feeling the pull to leave. I could see the pain in his eyes yesterday when he saw the sea. Real or not, it stirred feelings in him that he would rather not have right now."
"Wow," she said, a look of regret crossing her face. "I had no idea. Don't worry. I'll make sure that when I'm expecting you two, I won't be on a beach." Her expression changed to one of anticipation. "Can you call him now?"
Aragorn smiled at her enthusiasm. He could not help but think that she was just a little enamored of Legolas. Aragorn concentrated on thinking of Legolas. For a moment, nothing happened.
Lauren noticed. "Yesterday you said that you wished Legolas were here. Maybe you have to say it out loud."
Shrugging, Aragorn did as she suggested. Not even a moment passed before Legolas appeared in front of them. Apparently, it did take a vocal prompt to call Legolas.
"Suliad," Lauren said, remembering his greeting from the previous night.
Legolas automatically returned her greeting, then nodded to Aragorn. "Where are we? This is not the same place we were last night." He moved over to sit down on the blanket beside Aragorn.
"No, it's not," Lauren said. "This is a better place for stargazing. I prefer to be up high, like the top of this hill, so the trees are on the horizon line and not blocking the view."
Legolas looked around and nodded his approval, stopping for a long moment to gaze at the remnants of the sunset. "This will be a good place to observe the stars." He noticed the two objects sitting nearby. "What are those?"
Lauren grinned. "The larger item is a telescope. We'll get to that later. The smaller one is a radio. It plays music. Would you like to hear?"
Aragorn looked askance at Lauren. "I do not believe that would be a good idea. I have already told you that elves would not appreciate what you consider music."
"Come on, Aragorn," she protested. "It's not all that bad."
Aragorn glanced over to Legolas. "You may want to prepare yourself. But I suppose you have heard worse…in battle."
Lauren glared at Aragorn. "My music is not that bad," she muttered to herself. She reached over and turned on the radio. A soft mellow song with a Celtic sound by Loreena MeKennitt drifted out of the radio.
Legolas looked at Aragorn in surprise. "That is much like what we would hear at home, Aragorn. Why did you feel it necessary to warn me about it?"
Aragorn looked back and forth between Legolas and Lauren. "I have never heard anything like that come from her radio. This is not her normal style of music," he protested.
Legolas grinned slightly. "Are you sure you were not exaggerating when you compared her music to the sounds of battle?"
Glaring at Legolas, Aragorn defended himself. "While I will admit that this selection is more to my liking, this is not what she normally chooses. You would not like some of her choices, my friend. Trust me on that."
"I do not know, Aragorn. I find it difficult to believe that someone who enjoys this music could also enjoy listening to what you describe." Legolas was enjoying seeing Aragorn thrown by Lauren's musical choices and could not resist teasing him about it.
Aragorn looked over to Lauren. "Unless you are doing this to make me appear foolish, you may want to say something about your music choice."
She grinned innocently at them. "Would I do something like that?" Before either of them could respond to her question, she went on. "I do happen to enjoy a variety of different musical styles. I just thought the both of you would prefer this style. Instead of accusing me of playing a joke on you or something, you should be thanking me." She set the radio to play a selection from Loreena McKennitt, Sarah McLaughlin, and Norah Jones and made sure the volume was kept low. She did not want the sounds to disturb either Legolas or Aragorn, and she only wanted the music to be a background sound as she told them about the stars.
Legolas smiled at the disgruntled look on Aragorn's face and decided to change the subject before Aragorn could say anything more about Lauren's music. "You said that you were going to describe the new discoveries your people have made?"
She paused and looked at both men for a moment. "I had time to think things over a bit after you left. I'm not sure this is really a good idea. You two are going to have to swear to me that what I tell you will go no further. I can't risk changing history by having this knowledge leak out thousands of years before it is discovered."
Aragorn looked at her in concern. "We have been telling Arwen and Gimli all that occurs in this place. Can we not tell them?"
Lauren sighed. "I'd rather you didn't, but as long as they're the only ones who know, I can accept that. Some of the things I'll tell you could be discovered by your people if you have someone who is able to invent a telescope or studies the stars intensely and has a great understanding of math. But some of the more recent discoveries could not possibly have been made without very advanced telescopes, which you don't have. I can't over-emphasize the importance of this. The race of man cannot have this information before it was supposed to have been discovered. As long as you understand that, we'll be fine."
"We understand, and you have our word that we will tell no one besides Arwen and Gimli," Aragorn said. Legolas nodded his agreement.
Nodding in return, Lauren accepted their vow. "Well then, you may as well make yourselves comfortable, and we can get started." She thought up a soft, pillowed backrest, and leaned back comfortably. "Before we start looking at the stars and talking about the recent discoveries, there are a few basic concepts we have to get straight first. Gravity is a good place to start, I think."
"Gravity?" Legolas asked, testing the unfamiliar word.
"Yes, it's what causes things to fall to earth. There is a story that a mathematician named Newton came up with the concept when an apple fell from a tree, but I think it was a bit more complicated than that. When you shoot an arrow over a great distance, you have to aim above the target, right?" She used her hands to mime shooting an arrow upwards, above a target.
Legolas and Aragorn looked at her in surprise. "You are an archer?" Aragorn asked.
"No, I've never held a bow and arrow in my life, but I understand the physical concepts behind it. Now, as much as I love astronomy, physics was never my favorite subject, and I don't think I could explain it well, so I'm just going to gloss over a few things. But with an understanding of gravity and a few physics equations, you can predict the path of an arrow. All projectiles follow an arc, a curved path as gravity pulls the object down to earth. So, for shooting over distances, you must compensate for this downward pull, correct?"
They both nodded, having experienced this for themselves.
"Good, this downward pull is called gravity. It is an attractive force between any two bodies with mass. Now, the more massive object will exert a greater force than the less massive object. That is why an apple will fall toward the ground rather than toward the tree it came from. Both the tree and the ground exert a gravitational force on the apple, but the earth is so much more massive, that the attractive force of the tree doesn't seem to even exist.”
Aragorn frowned. He was not entirely sure about this concept, never having felt this attractive force to anything but the earth, but he didn't see how that had anything to do with the stars. He said so.
Lauren smiled. "Because it is this same force that controls the movement of the planets and the stars. This force extends far beyond the boundaries of our one world. And that brings us to the next major concept. This is a big one. The earth is not the center of the universe. In our solar system, the sun is the central point, and the earth and all the planets revolve around it."
They stared at her. Aragorn had heard her say this once before, but he still had trouble believing it.
"How can that be?" Legolas asked. "The earth does not move. We would feel it."
"Actually, that couldn't be further from the truth," Lauren said softly. She knew she was treading on dangerous ground, and didn't want to push this too far. "The earth is revolving around the sun and rotating on its axis. Gravity is the reason we don't feel the motion. The Earth is tilted on its axis, and this causes the change in the seasons. One revolution around the sun is one year. As the earth rotates on its axis, the sun and the stars seem to cross the sky. When the earth is rotated toward the sun, we have daylight. When the earth is rotated away from the sun, we have night."
She decided a visual aid would help get her point across better. She thought of a small three-dimensional model of the solar system, and one appeared in front of her, between her and the men. She pointed to the yellow ball in the middle of the model. "This is the sun." As she thought it, the model planets started moving, rotating on their individual axes. She pointed to the third planet from the sun with its moon revolving around it. "This is the earth and the moon, which is the only body that actually orbits the earth."
Aragorn and Legolas watched the motion of the bodies in the model. Legolas pointed to the other objects. "What are these?"
"Those would be the other planets. Earth is only one of nine planets in our solar system."
"So many?" Aragorn wondered. "You said they are like Earth?"
"Insofar that they are other worlds orbiting the sun, yes. None of them harbor life like Earth does." She pointed to each one in turn, starting with the closest one to the sun. "This is Mercury. It is a small, rocky world less than half the size of Earth. It is much too close to the sun to allow life to form. The normal temperature is about three times as hot as boiling water. There also isn't much of an atmosphere, which is what holds in gasses that allow life to develop."
She moved on to the next one, thinking this could be a little tricky. "This is Venus, the world that I believe you call Eärendil." Their gazes both shot to her face at that. Lauren tilted her head slightly as she looked at Aragorn. " Eärendil was related to you, right?"
Aragorn nodded. "Yes, he is Lord Elrond's father. He is half-elven, and long ago sailed to Valinor to ask for the Valar's help. He was not allowed to return to Middle-earth, but the Valar let him sail the skies in his ship with the bright light of a Silmaril at the bow. He descended from the skies with the great birds of heaven to help battle the dragons as the elves, Valar and men fought against Morgoth at the end of the first age. Eärendil slew the greatest of the dragons and cast him from the sky. I believe that you are a little confused. This planet that you call Venus can not possibly be Eärendil and his ship. "
"Eärendil is not simply a legend, as you apparently believe," Legolas said. "He is real, and his story is true. He was seen by many when he came to join the battle against Morgoth."
Lauren's brow wrinkled in thought. "OK, then, yes, I'm confused. I'm a person of science, and what I know about the planets is fact. There is no arguing that Venus is a planet. We have pictures of it. It has been there for as long as Earth has existed. It's not like something changed between then and now." She waved her hands to indicate her confusion.
"But something did change," Legolas said slowly. "After the kings of Númenor assailed Valinor, Ilúvatar removed Valinor from the world and placed it in the realm of hidden things. The world was greatly diminished from that point on."
Lauren followed Legolas' train of thought. "Perhaps it was not only Valinor that was hidden. If the world became more…ordinary, for lack of a better word, then a ship sailing the skies was probably also taken away. Has anyone seen him since that time?"
Aragorn and Legolas shook their heads. "Not in person," Aragorn added.
"Maybe they were pulled into another dimension, or a parallel reality," Lauren mused to herself. "I suppose that's possible. As much as a person sailing the vacuum of space in a wooden ship is possible." She looked back at them and didn't offer to explain the concepts of parallel realities. That would be a bit too much. "OK. I accept that at one time, the bright light in the sky referred to as the morning or evening star was Eärendil and his ship. Then he was hidden with Valinor. Now, that 'star' is Venus. Would you like to hear about it?"
They nodded, thinking that from her tone of voice, she didn't truly believe that Eärendil had ever sailed the skies as they knew to be true. But the explanation was enough to satisfy them, and they wanted to hear more about what the skies were like in her day and age.
"OK then," she said as she started her description. "Venus is the closest in size to Earth, and for a very long time, people thought that it might be a twin to Earth. A thick layer of clouds covers Venus, so no one knew what the surface might be like. It wasn’t until a few decades ago, when humans landed machines on the surface that we had any idea what lay beneath the clouds."
Their gazes once again locked on her face. "You have put machines on other worlds?" Legolas asked in amazement.
"Yes," she answered with a grin. "I told you that we've made a lot of discoveries in the last few decades. This is a very exciting time for astronomy. We have landed spacecraft on several of the worlds and moons in our solar system. The distances are far too vast to reach any other systems, but we're learning a lot more about our own neighborhood. I'll cover some more of those discoveries later, if that's all right?" They nodded slightly, and Lauren was a little concerned that she was telling them too much, too quickly. But they seemed willing to continue listening, so she went back to telling them about Venus.
"What they discovered amazed a lot of people. The surface temperature was higher than that of Mercury, though it was further away from the sun. The clouds apparently trap the heat of the sun, so the temperature is over four times that of boiling water. Wait a minute, I have an idea."
She gestured toward the suddenly darkened sky, and an image of Venus appeared there. They stared upward in amazement. They were truly looking at another world, as it was seen from space, and not from Earth. This was something they would never have expected to see.
"This is one of the pictures taken from a spacecraft orbiting Venus. You can see the thick clouds that I was talking about." She showed them several of the images of the planet taken from spacecraft that had landed on the surface.
"You already know that Earth is the next planet in the list, and I think you'll enjoy these images." She showed them images of Earth taken from space, and heard them both gasp beside her. "Pretty amazing, isn't it?" She showed them a few more, then showed them one taken from the surface of the moon. "We've actually had people walk on the moon," she told them. "The first people to walk on the moon were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, several years before I was born. As he stepped on to the surface for the first time, Neil Armstrong said words that have made their way into the collective human memory. 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' I've seen images of that moment. In fact, how about we watch that?" She leaned back and played the images of the moonwalk across the sky.
"That is a human?" Legolas asked as one of the men came into view. "Why does he look so odd, and why is he moving like that?"
"Those are spacesuits that protect them and allow them to breathe," Lauren explained. "There is no breathable atmosphere on the moon, so in order to breathe, they have to carry their oxygen in tanks. And since the moon is much less massive than the Earth, it doesn't have as strong of a gravitational pull. It's not easy to walk normally on the moon, so they do that kind of hopping motion."
Aragorn was silent as they watched the video, and Legolas turned to look at him. "What are you thinking?" he asked quietly.
"Mankind has achieved things we could never have dreamed of," Aragorn remarked.
"It's all a little overwhelming isn't it?" Lauren asked sympathetically. "By the time I was born, we already knew a lot about the solar system and the stars around us. I learned some of this in school as a child. It was just something I accepted and I guess I took it for granted. I never considered what it would be like to suddenly be told this without having the background that I had. Do you want me to stop?"
"No," Legolas said emphatically. "Lauren, you cannot tell us only this much and then stop. You said there were nine planets, and you have only told us of two others."
"Aragorn?" Lauren asked. She wanted to keep going, but would stop if it was making either of them too uncomfortable.
"Yes, please continue," he said. It was overwhelming, but like Legolas, he wanted to learn more.
"Very well," she said. "The next planet in the sequence is Mars. It's about half the size of Earth. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on with it right now. For many years, people have thought there might be alien life on Mars. Through telescopes, people have seen what they believed to be canals made by intelligent life, and features that appeared as if they had been made by liquid water. As we have learned more about Mars, it became evident that there is no intelligent alien life there, but there may once have been liquid water, so there is a possibility that life could have formed. The life that I'm talking about is not like the plant or animal life you may be thinking. It would be so small that you can't actually see it without a microscope, a device that magnifies the image. We have two rovers, machines named Sprit and Opportunity which are currently roaming the surface of the planet. They have sent back numerous images to Earth of the surface of Mars. They have been examining the make up of the soil and rocks that they find. I don't know exactly what discoveries they've made, but I can say that the exploration of this planet is making history."
She looked at the confused expressions on their faces. "Oops, I lost you a while back on that one, didn't I? Sorry. This is just such an exciting time for discoveries being made on this planet. The short version is that we have a chance of finding life on another planet for the first time. How about we move on to some of the images?" She projected some of the satellite images of Mars on the sky.
"What are all those circles?" Legolas asked as one of the images displayed.
"They're impact craters," Lauren explained. "Objects called asteroids and meteoroids fly around in the space between the planets, and they occasionally strike the planets. Those circular shapes are the result of an impact." She went on to show them other images of Mars and pointed out the features that indicated past liquid water on the surface.
Once she finished with Mars, she told them of the gas giant planets in the system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Aragorn and Legolas were amazed to find out how large these planets were. Aragorn's eyes widened in surprise when Lauren told them that the 'Great Red Spot' visible in Jupiter's atmosphere was a storm larger than Earth that had lasted for more than four hundred years. She showed them numerous images of the planets, the stripes of Jupiter's atmosphere, the rings of Saturn, and the blue colors of Uranus and Neptune. They asked many questions, and Lauren did her best to answer them and not confuse them. Once she had covered the most well known of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, she told them about Pluto, and its moon Charon. *
When she talked about Saturn, she had to tell them about Cassini, the satellite in orbit of Saturn and the Huygen's probe that it had very recently dropped to the surface of one of it's moons, Titan. She made sure not to go into detail about any of the discoveries, just mentioned that people were still studying the information that they were receiving from these instruments.
"Now, how about we finally get around to looking at the stars?" She thought about the night sky, and the last image that she had displayed vanished, to be replaced by a vista of the stars.
Legolas studied the stars for a moment. "The stars are wrong."
"What?" she asked. "Oh, you mean they're winter constellations and we're obviously in the summer? Well I love the winter constellations, but I hate the cold, so we're getting the best of both worlds."
"No, it is more than that," Legolas said. "This is not how the stars should look."
"Why don't you show me how they should look?" Lauren asked him.
Legolas looked back and forth between Aragorn and Lauren. "How do I do that?"
"Just concentrate on what you want to show us. The sky will change to mirror your thoughts." Lauren coached Legolas on how to alter their environment.
Legolas did as she asked, and the stars changed.
"Wow," she said in amazement as the sky filled with more stars than she had ever seen with the naked eye. "I don't think I've ever seen this many stars by simply looking up at the sky."
"Have some of the stars disappeared?" Aragorn asked in confusion.
"No," she explained. "They're still there, but we just can't see them. Light pollution is the bane of all ground based observing. We have so many cities in our world that the light given off by these cities tends to block out the fainter stars. You have to get away from any cities to truly be able to see the stars, and that's not always an easy thing to do." She studied the stars around her and began to see a few familiar constellations. Legolas was right, they weren't as she had expected them to be.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I feel like such an idiot. Of course the stars would appear different. There is a phenomenon called precession that affects where the stars seem to be. I told you about the axis that the Earth revolves around?" They nodded. "Well, that axis has a little bit of a wobble. It moves around like a child's top." She used her hand to demonstrate. "It takes 26,000 years for a full circle to be completed, and we apparently are at different places in that cycle."
Legolas nodded in understanding. "The change in the stars has been noticed by the elves before, especially the older ones, but we have never known how to explain the movement."
Lauren looked at him. "Well, I hope my explanation helped. Do you mind if I move things around a bit to how I see the sky? It will help with what I wanted to show you. I never really studied the Southern Hemisphere constellations, and I have a feeling that's what some of those are. I don't know enough about them to say anything."
"Do what you need to do," Legolas said.
"OK," she said as the sky changed back to the previous configuration. "You should still be able to recognize some of the constellations," she said. "They just might not be where you expect them to be." She pointed to Polaris. "That is called Polaris, the North Star. If you ever need to find the direction of north in my time, just find that star." She looked over to Legolas. "Why don't you see if you recognize anything and let me know."
Legolas pointed to a grouping of stars that seemed to form a large 'W'. That is Wilwarin, the butterfly."
Lauren smiled. "I know it as Cassiopeia, the Queen." She outlined the stars and continued. "That is supposed to look like a queen sitting on her throne."
Aragorn then gestured to another grouping of stars. "That is Menelmacar, the Swordsman of the Sky. He has long been my favorite constellation, ever since Elrond taught me of him."
Lauren favored him with a bright smile. "Me too. Orion the Hunter has always been my favorite constellation. Is this how you see him?" She used her hand to outline the stars that represented his legs, his shoulders, the three stars that made up his belt and the stars coming down from the belt for his sword, and the bow that he held in one hand.
"Yes," Aragorn said. "It is nice to see that some things do not change."
"I guess it's just easy to see a hunter in that grouping of stars. But my mom likes it for another reason."
"What is that reason?" Legolas asked.
Lauren started laughing. "We went to a planetarium when I was young. That's a place where people show others the stars in a domed building and teach them about the sky. The names of the constellations that we use were decided a long time ago. One of the people at the planetarium noted that if we had been naming the constellations today, we might have seen something much different. They suggested that we might see a very famous singer in that constellation by the name of Elvis. The legs and shoulders of course remained the same, but the bow he holds became an upraised arm holding a microphone, which is a device that amplifies the voice to be heard by a large number of people. The sword became the cord of the microphone, hanging down past his body. Now, my mom loved Elvis. He died some time ago, but she has always loved Orion after hearing him described as Elvis. Personally, I think I'll stick with thinking of him as an archer, a hunter, a protector. I used to look up at the sky and think he was there to protect me from harm. Of course, I was much younger when I thought that, but I've always had a soft spot for him since then."
She pointed to the red star at his shoulder. "That red star is called Betelgeuse. Literally translated, I think that means 'the armpit of the giant'. Not the prettiest of names, but you can see where they got the name. Betelgeuse is a red giant star. It's about a thousand times as large as our sun is. If you were to put Betelgeuse where the sun is, it would extend to about Jupiter's orbit, and the inner four planets would be consumed."
They went on in this manner for some time, sharing the names of the constellations and stars, along with any stories behind them or facts known about them. She told them that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky was actually a binary star, two stars orbiting each other, though only one was bright enough to be seen. The second star in the system was a white dwarf, a small dead star.*
"A dwarf star? Gimli will be pleased to know that some of the stars have been named after his people," Aragorn commented.
"If we tell him that it is a small, dead star, he will not be quite so honored," Legolas pointed out wryly.
"We do not have to tell him that part," Aragorn replied with a grin.
Once they had discussed most of the constellations that they all recognized, Lauren decided it was time to do something different. "I think it is time to switch gears and go look through the telescope," she said, standing up and moving over to the object they had almost forgotten about. Standing up, they stood near her and watched as she quickly set up the machine with easy, practiced moves. "Once the telescope is aligned, the computer knows where all the other objects in the sky should be," she explained. "I will warn you that what you will see in this telescope won't look like the pretty images we looked at earlier. Those pictures were taken by larger telescopes with better light gathering power and with longer exposures. And some of those images were taken from space, much closer to the target. But it will still be a closer look at some of these objects than you'd ever see with the naked eye."
She set the telescope to point at Venus. "There's Venus," she said, stepping back and gesturing for Legolas to look through the eyepiece.
He looked through the telescope, then looked back at her. "It looks like the crescent moon."
"Yes, with a telescope, you can see the phases of Venus, much like the phases of the moon. It's quite a bit smaller, though. Venus is much further away than the moon."
Aragorn took his turn next. He seemed a bit amazed that he was getting a closer look at the 'star' he had spent most of his life searching for whenever he looked into the sky. Lauren then turned the telescope toward Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. They were able to see the rings of Saturn and a few stripes in Jupiter's atmosphere, along with the four largest moons stretched out in a line around Jupiter. Aragorn remarked that they did look much different than the images she had shown them, and the colors of the atmospheres could not be seen.
Lauren had to remind them that the objects that recorded the images acted differently than the human eye. She grinned to herself at the looks of amazement and awe in their faces as they looked at the planets of the solar system for the first time. Once they had seen all of the planets that were visible through the small telescope, she showed them the double star Alberio. The bright blue color of one of the stars was clear in the eyepiece. She showed them the open star cluster of the Pleiades, the Orion and Crab nebulas, and the Andromeda galaxy. They spent more than an hour just pointing the telescope at anything they could find and exclaiming at what they could see. But the most amazing thing for them was when she turned the telescope on the full moon. They were able to see details of the dark regions called the marias, or the 'seas', the numerous craters and the mountains. It was a long time before they would turn away from the telescope, and they did so reluctantly only when Lauren promised to show them better images of the objects they had seen through the telescope.
As they settled back onto the blanket, Lauren realized what was missing from her observing session. "We need some hot chocolate," she declared. "While I realize the temperature is warmer than usual, I always have a thermos of hot chocolate on hand for my observing sessions. Would you like some as well?"
Aragorn and Legolas looked at each other, then back to her. "And what would that be?" Aragorn asked.
"A hot drink usually made with a combination of milk and powdered chocolate," she explained.
"What is chocolate?" Legolas asked.
She stared at them, aghast. "You don't know what chocolate is? You poor deprived people! Chocolate is manna from heaven, ambrosia from the gods, edible bliss."
The men had to laugh at her enthusiasm. "Well, I would not pass up a chance to taste something that could inspire that reaction," Aragorn said, still chuckling.
She thought for a minute. "OK, we'll have hot chocolate, but we have to have something else with it. Do you both like fruit and nuts?"
"Yes," Legolas said, confused. "Are we going to be eating those with the drink you have proposed?"
"Yes," she said. "But they won't be quite as you expect."
A tray appeared in their midst. Aragorn and Legolas leaned forward and studied it. There was a pitcher sitting on it with three cups, a collection of cookies with dark spots in them, a bowl of small dark, round objects, and a pile of strawberries covered in a dark smooth substance. They looked back at her and waited for her explanation.
"So I got a little carried away," she shrugged. "There are strawberries dipped in chocolate, chocolate covered nuts, and chocolate chip cookies." She picked up the insulated pitcher and carefully poured three cups of the hot chocolate. "Be careful, it's hot." Bringing her cup to her lips, she closed her eyes and inhaled the steam. After blowing gently across the surface of the drink, she took a tentative sip. Finding the temperature to be just as she liked it, she took a deeper drink and sighed in pleasure. "That really hits the spot." She opened her eyes to see their reactions as they took their first sip.
After the first tentative sip, their eyes widened. "That is very sweet," Aragorn commented. He licked his lips and took another drink. "I have never tasted anything quite like this."
Legolas did not comment, but took a deeper drink of his own. Lauren smirked at the rapturous look on his face. It appeared that another chocoholic was born. "I agree. This is delicious," he finally said, before reaching for a chocolate covered strawberry. "I did not believe it possible, but this is even better," he said after the first taste.
For the next few minutes, they tried everything on the tray, finding that they loved everything offered. Lauren had to re-fill the tray before they were satisfied enough to sit back and go back to looking at the sky. With a cup of hot chocolate in hand, Lauren leaned back against the pillows she had conjured earlier.
"The next set of images are of objects called nebulas." She pointed back up toward the sky, and the men reclined to better see the image. They gazed in awe at the wispy, brilliantly colored clouds that appeared above them. The complex patterns and different shapes of each nebula caught the eye and made them lean closer as if for a better look. The bright colors appeared as gems against the black sky behind them.
She pulled up images of the great dark pillars in the Eagle Nebula standing out as dark shapes against a blue-green background, and the great expanse of glowing gases in the Orion Nebula, a fantast mixture of pinks, oranges, browns and greens. There were circular planetary nebulas like the Helix and Ring Nebulas, a central circle of blue surrounded by circles of orange and red. She showed them pictures of the pastel colors and intricate patterns in the Cat's Eye nebula, as well as objects with names like the Rosette, Egg and Hourglass nebulas with their vivid colors and complex shapes. Each image was as breathtaking as the previous one, and she told them what she knew of each one as she showed it upon the sky. Their reactions were all that she could have hoped for. They were lost in the images and the beauty that existed far beyond the confines of their world.
"All of the things that I showed you are fairly local things," she told them. "They are within our own galaxy. Now I told Aragorn a little about this, but I don't think I mentioned this to you, Legolas. We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way galaxy. This galaxy is very large."
She took a deep breath and began to try to explain just how large the galaxy was. "A light year is a unit of measurement specified as the distance that light can travel in one year. One light year is approximately 6 trillion miles, so that would be about 2 trillion leagues. By the way, that would be a two with twelve zeros following it. The nearest star is over four light years away, and our galaxy is one hundred and twenty thousand light years across." She grinned at the dumbfounded look on their faces. "I know, the distances are mind-boggling. I don't even truly have the faintest idea how far that is, but I wanted you to have some idea of the scale of the objects we'll be looking at. Our galaxy is just one of many, and most of them have billions of stars. But the best way to do this is just to show you some of them."
An image of a beautiful, majestic spiral galaxy appeared over their heads, and both man and elf gasped at the sight. "That's the Pinwheel galaxy," she told them. "It's a spiral galaxy. Can you see the separate arms?" They nodded. She went on to show them pictures of the Andromeda, Sombrero, and several unnamed galaxies, all with distinct bright spiral arms arcing gracefully away from a central mass.
When she brought up a picture of the Mice galaxies, Legolas asked why the shape was not like that of the others. The image she had just showed them did not have a tight spiral structure, but looked as if some of the spirals had been thrown out away from the central part of the galaxy, as if they were coming unwound.
"There are many instances of galaxy interactions," Lauren explained. "When two galaxies get close to each other, their gravity affects each other and like you can see in this image, there is often a 'tidal tail'. The galaxies get distorted by the close interaction." She showed them pictures of more interacting galaxies, the Whirlpool, Tadpole and the Antennae galaxies with their spiral cores being trailed by a long, bright tail and bright blue star clusters.
Then she showed them what she thought of as the ultimate image. "This is a picture of a very small section of sky called the 'Hubble Ultra Deep Field'." They gasped anew as they saw in that small section of sky thousands of galaxies, showing up as only small smudges of light, some showing the same spiral structure she had shown them earlier. "I love this image," she commented softly. "If none of those other images did it, this one truly lets us see the magnitude, the magnificence of God or Ilúvatar's creation. It has been estimated that there are about one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. In this image alone, there are about ten thousand."
"Does that not make you feel incredibly small?" Aragorn asked as he stared deeply into the image.
"In a way," Lauren allowed. "But it just makes me hungrier for knowledge, really. I want to know what's out there. In all of that, I don't think we could possibly be the only living creatures, do you? There are an unknown number of planets in other systems out there. In the last ten years, since the first extra-solar planet was discovered, scientists have detected over one hundred and fifty of them. The ones we have discovered so far are all gas giant planets, like Jupiter.* We don't expect to find life on those, but as the technology improves, we may be able to see planets of similar size to Earth. We're a very curious people, you see. We want to know what is out there, if we're alone in our neighborhood, or if there is intelligent alien life somewhere. In my opinion, there has to be intelligent alien life out there in that vast universe, we just haven't been able to find it yet."
"Alien life?" Aragorn asked. "If you find it, will you travel to meet it?"
"Not in my lifetime," Lauren exclaimed. "And not for a very long time to come. We don't have the technology to do anything like that right now. If you'll remember, the furthest we've had manned missions is to the moon. At that, we only had a handful of people visit the moon, and none for years. Right now, the only reason we have people going into space is because of the International Space Station."
"What is that?" Legolas asked his now very familiar question.
"It's an orbiting station that is manned at the moment by two astronauts. It usually has a complement of three people, but after the Columbia accident, the shuttles haven't been in use."
When her statement met two very blank looks, she hurried to explain. "Sorry. The space shuttles are the vehicles used by my country to put people in space and bring them back home. In February of 2003, a couple of years ago, as they were returning, the shuttle Columbia broke up in the atmosphere. All seven astronauts were killed. It was a horrible accident."
"Seven men died and you are still sending men into space?" Aragorn asked, aghast.
"The exploration of space is a risky business," Lauren explained. "Those aboard Columbia were not the first astronauts to die. It is always a tragedy that is mourned by the nation and the world at large. But in determining what caused the accident, we can fix the problem and make the next flight a safer one. I truly admire people who can go into space knowing what risks they may be facing. And by the way, not all those on the shuttle were men. Two women were also aboard."
"Women?" Aragorn asked in amazement.
Lauren's eyes narrowed as she looked at him. "While there are still a few jobs that are not allowed for women, we have the ability to work alongside men at whatever we choose to do. I knew as I grew up that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Do you have a problem with that?"
"No," Aragorn said. "I respect women and know them to be very capable. But in my time, no man would knowingly send a woman into a dangerous situation."
"Being an astronaut is a great honor, and something that people have to go through much training to achieve. If a woman is able to complete the training and has skills necessary for the job, why should she be prevented from going into space?" she asked seriously.
Aragorn inclined his head, granting her the point. "She should not," he said, knowing that Lauren would not accept any other response.
"You have people in space right now?" Legolas asked in fascination.
"At least two," Lauren explained. "And it shouldn't be much longer before the shuttles are operating as normal again. They've had one successful flight so far, but still have a few problems to work out. Once all the problems are fixed, we'll have a few more people going back and forth. Maybe then they'll be able to service Hubble." The last line was spoken nearly under her breath.
"What was that?" Aragorn asked.
She sighed as she looked over at Aragorn. "You know all those fantastic pictures I was showing you? Most of them were taken by one amazing piece of technology. The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit since 1990, about fifteen years now. It's made some amazing discoveries in that time. Besides taking some of the most gorgeous pictures anyone has ever seen, it has helped us figure out the answers to many questions. We now know the age of the universe, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the existence of dark energy, how galaxies evolve, that super-massive black holes are in the centers of most galaxies and it has helped us find a lot of those extra-solar planets I told you about earlier. But it needs servicing. There are several parts that need replaced. If Hubble doesn't get serviced soon, the telescope could stop functioning sometime in the next three to five years. Before the shuttle accident there was a mission planned to go up and replace the aging parts and replace a couple of the cameras as well. Once the shuttles were grounded, the mission was put on hold. That's fine, we want the shuttles to be safe for our astronauts. The telescope is great, but the safety of the astronauts has to come first. But now that it looks like the shuttles are going to fly again, they need to put a servicing mission back on the docket. There has been a lot of debate over the last couple of years as to whether or not that would happen; but in my humble opinion, it would be a tragedy to simply let the telescope die without some attempt being made to keep it functioning for years to come. Who knows what we'll discover next?" *
As she got more and more worked up about the telescope, her concentration slipped, and the radio suddenly started blaring her more normal style of music. At first, she didn't even notice, merely incorporated the beat of the music into the pattern of hand gestures she was making to emphasize her point. It wasn't until she looked over at Legolas and saw his hands clamped firmly over his ears that she realized what had happened. With that realization, the music just as suddenly cut off completely.
"Sorry," she apologized sheepishly. "When I get going on certain topics, I really get going. Are you OK?"
Legolas slowly removed his hands from his ears and looked at her. "I will be fine, but I begin to see what Aragorn meant about your musical tastes."
"I told you so," Aragorn muttered in satisfaction.
Lauren laughed and shook her head slightly. "Fine, your point has been made. But I still hold that my music is not all that bad. It's just different than what you're used to."
"That much is true," Aragorn allowed. "We have never heard anything like your music."
"So what is your music like?" Lauren asked in curiosity. "I can hardly say whether it is better than mine if I've never heard it, now can I?"
Aragorn and Legolas looked at each other. "Why don't you sing for us, Legolas?" Aragorn asked. "Show Lauren what elven music is like."
"You could join me," Legolas said.
"And have you complain that I do not do the song justice? I think not." Aragorn crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Legolas with a raised eyebrow.
Legolas smiled at Aragorn. While it was true that elven music did not sound quite the same coming from a human, Aragorn well knew that Legolas' complaints had been made in jest. But, having made them, he could not now insist that Aragorn join him. Legolas nodded in acknowledgment to Aragorn and watched as Aragorn and Lauren made themselves comfortable. After a moment, he decided to start with a traditional elven melody, A Elbereth Gilthoniel. He thought it an appropriate song, as it was about the stars in the heavens.
Lauren reclined back against her pillows and closed her eyes, letting the sound of Legolas' voice wash over her. It truly was like nothing she had ever heard before. The elven song was beautiful, ethereal and otherworldly as it drifted on the air. A tear slipped out from beneath her closed lids, but she paid it no mind and let herself float away into the music.
Aragorn noticed the rapt expression on her face and nudged Legolas. Legolas looked at her and smiled before closing his own eyes and losing himself to the music. As the song ended, he shifted smoothly to another, singing songs of the stars, nature, the heavens, and the Valar. He sang for a long time, his voice the only sound to be heard. The last song he sang was of the fading of the elves as their time on Middle-earth ended. As the last note drifted away, Legolas opened his eyes and looked back to Aragorn.
Aragorn had a relaxed smile on his face. Listening to Legolas sing always had a calming effect on him, no matter what situation they found themselves in. Aragorn gestured to Lauren. She lay still with her eyes closed. "I think you sang her to sleep," Aragorn commented.
"Hardly." Her voice was soft and faraway. "I don't know how anyone could sleep through that." She sat up slowly and shook her head as if rousing herself from a trance. "That was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. I can see why you might consider my music to be harsh. I thank you Legolas. You have given me a gift that I will never forget. That music will stay with me for the rest of my life."
They simply stared at her for a moment. That was not her normal behavior at all.
Legolas nodded in acceptance of her praise. Humans were often amazed at the beauty of elven music when they first heard it.
She noticed Aragorn staring and smiled self-consciously. "If I believed in magic, I think I'd accuse you of putting a spell on me, Legolas. After this, I may just start believing in magic again. I used to, when I was a child." Her voice was wistful as she spoke the last line.
Aragorn couldn't help but laugh. "Gimli was worried that you had put a spell on me, and you claim Legolas has bewitched you. I seem to be surrounded by those with magical gifts."
"Gimli thought I had put a spell on you?" Lauren asked, confused. "Why? I certainly don't have any magical abilities."
"I would not say that," Legolas said, gesturing to the sky where she had shown the images of the universe. "You managed to open our eyes to an entire universe that we did not know existed. We should be thanking you."
Lauren shook her head, and waved a hand dismissively. A smile lit her face, though as she replied. "Fine. You're welcome. I'm glad to share what knowledge I have. Do you have any other questions that I might be able to answer?"
"How old is the universe?" Legolas asked, thinking back to a question that he had wondered about earlier when she was talking about the telescope named Hubble, but had not had the chance to ask.
"The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Much older than even the most ancient elf, I'm sure." She looked at Aragorn and noticed that he was becoming transparent. "Is it morning already?"
Aragorn looked down and noticed the same thing. "We shall see you again tonight." He glanced over at the tray and quickly grabbed a strawberry, shoving it into his mouth before he lost the ability to interact with the dream world. "Thank you for that, as well," he said, grinning widely.
Legolas tried to imitate his last minute grab, but found that he was already too insubstantial. As Aragorn woke up, Legolas faded as well. The disappointment on his face caused Lauren to start giggling. "Don't worry, I'll supply more tomorrow," she said as they faded away completely.
Lauren sighed at finding herself alone again. She lay back down and turned on the radio. Instead of her normal music, Legolas' voice once more filled the night. "Now I just have to figure out how to entertain them tomorrow," she muttered. "I've tapped out my astronomy knowledge. So what else would interest them?" Closing her eyes in thought, she absently picked up a chocolate chip cookie and listened to the music of the elves as a smile spread across her face.
*A/N: Since this story was written in 2005, a few new discoveries have been made in astronomy. I did not change them in the story, since the character is living in 2005, but I felt I needed to include an update of that information. In the winter of 2005, Pluto was discovered to have two smaller moons, which were named Nix and Hydra in the spring of 2006. The bright star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major has been discovered to be a triple star system rather than a double star system. The smallest extra-solar planet found to date is about five times larger than Earth and orbits a red dwarf star. And the most exciting of all, the Space Shuttle Discovery has just had a successful launch on July 4th, 2006. This is the second successful launch since the Colombia accident in 2003, and one of the astronauts on the shuttle will stay on the International Space Station, brining the crew complement up to three. Assuming that the shuttles start normal flight operations again, a Hubble servicing mission is scheduled and is a priority for NASA.
Chapter Seven - Astronomy 101
When Aragorn fell asleep that evening, he found himself in an open meadow, with a gently sloping hill in front of him. As with previous times, to find Lauren, all he had to do was follow the sounds of her music. Looking up the hill toward the sound, he saw Lauren sitting at the top with an unusual device standing nearby. He walked easily up the hill and sat down next to her on the blanket she had spread out on the ground. She gestured to the vista in front of them. "I've always loved watching the sunset." The sky was a glorious mixture of oranges, reds and pinks in one of the most beautiful sunsets Aragorn had ever seen.
Aragorn nodded in agreement after taking a long appreciative glance at the view, then gestured toward her radio. A song much like those he had heard before was emanating from the speakers, and she was swaying slightly back and forth to the beat. "Nearly every time I see you, you are listening to your music."
"I couldn't imagine living without music," she commented. "No matter what mood I'm in, I can find music to complement it or to contrast it. It has the power to calm me, excite me, or lift my spirits when I'm feeling down. Even when I'm not listening to it, I almost always have a song in my head." She leaned over and turned off the radio, knowing that Aragorn did not share her musical tastes.
"The love of music is a very elven trait," Aragorn commented. "Though I do not believe that most elves would consider what you listen to, to be music." The expression on his face very clearly showed his dislike of her music.
"I happen to like it," she retorted easily. "But speaking of elves, where is Legolas? I thought he had planned to join us tonight." She looked around them and peeked behind Aragorn as if she thought that he might be hiding behind his friend.
"So you know that he was truly here?" Aragorn asked her, chuckling at the thought that Legolas would simply be hiding behind him.
"I figured it out," Lauren said, turning her attention back to Aragorn. "Even if you know him really well, I don't think his reactions would have been quite so genuine if he weren't really here. I certainly hope I didn't scare him away."
Aragorn raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his chest. Legolas was a rather fearless warrior in battle. The thought that he would be scared of Lauren was rather amusing. "Scare him away?"
Lauren chuckled. "I don't mean that he's afraid of me, but you have to admit that he was rather uncomfortable around me. I don't know why, but he doesn't seem to know what to make of me." The look on her face was one of pure innocence.
Aragorn just gave her an incredulous look, and Lauren rolled her eyes. "O.K. He probably wouldn't have been so uncomfortable if I hadn't been staring at him like a starving man at a feast."
Aragorn started laughing, and Lauren joined him. "For some reason, I seem to find myself laughing rather frequently around you," he said as the laughter died down.
"I'm hoping that means you share my odd sense of humor and aren't just laughing because you don't know how to react to me." Her lips quirked in a wry grin as she looked at him.
"I think it is a little of both," Aragorn admitted, running a hand through his hair to push back a recalcitrant lock of hair that insisted on falling in his face.
"Fair enough," she said, waving a hand through the air. "But if you bring Legolas back, I promise I'll be good…or at least I'll try my hardest." Her eyes sparkled mischievously as she tried to hold an innocent expression on her face.
Aragorn shook his head a little. He did not quite trust the look on her face. "The reason he is not here has nothing to do with you. I wanted to make sure that he would not find himself on the beach again."
"Does he have something against the beach?" Lauren asked, wrinkling her forehead in confusion.
"No," Aragorn said. "But the sea calls to him in a way you and I can never understand. The elves are leaving Middle-earth to sail to Valinor. Legolas has felt the call to join them. He has sworn not to leave while I still walk the land, but that does not keep him from feeling the pull to leave. I could see the pain in his eyes yesterday when he saw the sea. Real or not, it stirred feelings in him that he would rather not have right now."
"Wow," she said, a look of regret crossing her face. "I had no idea. Don't worry. I'll make sure that when I'm expecting you two, I won't be on a beach." Her expression changed to one of anticipation. "Can you call him now?"
Aragorn smiled at her enthusiasm. He could not help but think that she was just a little enamored of Legolas. Aragorn concentrated on thinking of Legolas. For a moment, nothing happened.
Lauren noticed. "Yesterday you said that you wished Legolas were here. Maybe you have to say it out loud."
Shrugging, Aragorn did as she suggested. Not even a moment passed before Legolas appeared in front of them. Apparently, it did take a vocal prompt to call Legolas.
"Suliad," Lauren said, remembering his greeting from the previous night.
Legolas automatically returned her greeting, then nodded to Aragorn. "Where are we? This is not the same place we were last night." He moved over to sit down on the blanket beside Aragorn.
"No, it's not," Lauren said. "This is a better place for stargazing. I prefer to be up high, like the top of this hill, so the trees are on the horizon line and not blocking the view."
Legolas looked around and nodded his approval, stopping for a long moment to gaze at the remnants of the sunset. "This will be a good place to observe the stars." He noticed the two objects sitting nearby. "What are those?"
Lauren grinned. "The larger item is a telescope. We'll get to that later. The smaller one is a radio. It plays music. Would you like to hear?"
Aragorn looked askance at Lauren. "I do not believe that would be a good idea. I have already told you that elves would not appreciate what you consider music."
"Come on, Aragorn," she protested. "It's not all that bad."
Aragorn glanced over to Legolas. "You may want to prepare yourself. But I suppose you have heard worse…in battle."
Lauren glared at Aragorn. "My music is not that bad," she muttered to herself. She reached over and turned on the radio. A soft mellow song with a Celtic sound by Loreena MeKennitt drifted out of the radio.
Legolas looked at Aragorn in surprise. "That is much like what we would hear at home, Aragorn. Why did you feel it necessary to warn me about it?"
Aragorn looked back and forth between Legolas and Lauren. "I have never heard anything like that come from her radio. This is not her normal style of music," he protested.
Legolas grinned slightly. "Are you sure you were not exaggerating when you compared her music to the sounds of battle?"
Glaring at Legolas, Aragorn defended himself. "While I will admit that this selection is more to my liking, this is not what she normally chooses. You would not like some of her choices, my friend. Trust me on that."
"I do not know, Aragorn. I find it difficult to believe that someone who enjoys this music could also enjoy listening to what you describe." Legolas was enjoying seeing Aragorn thrown by Lauren's musical choices and could not resist teasing him about it.
Aragorn looked over to Lauren. "Unless you are doing this to make me appear foolish, you may want to say something about your music choice."
She grinned innocently at them. "Would I do something like that?" Before either of them could respond to her question, she went on. "I do happen to enjoy a variety of different musical styles. I just thought the both of you would prefer this style. Instead of accusing me of playing a joke on you or something, you should be thanking me." She set the radio to play a selection from Loreena McKennitt, Sarah McLaughlin, and Norah Jones and made sure the volume was kept low. She did not want the sounds to disturb either Legolas or Aragorn, and she only wanted the music to be a background sound as she told them about the stars.
Legolas smiled at the disgruntled look on Aragorn's face and decided to change the subject before Aragorn could say anything more about Lauren's music. "You said that you were going to describe the new discoveries your people have made?"
She paused and looked at both men for a moment. "I had time to think things over a bit after you left. I'm not sure this is really a good idea. You two are going to have to swear to me that what I tell you will go no further. I can't risk changing history by having this knowledge leak out thousands of years before it is discovered."
Aragorn looked at her in concern. "We have been telling Arwen and Gimli all that occurs in this place. Can we not tell them?"
Lauren sighed. "I'd rather you didn't, but as long as they're the only ones who know, I can accept that. Some of the things I'll tell you could be discovered by your people if you have someone who is able to invent a telescope or studies the stars intensely and has a great understanding of math. But some of the more recent discoveries could not possibly have been made without very advanced telescopes, which you don't have. I can't over-emphasize the importance of this. The race of man cannot have this information before it was supposed to have been discovered. As long as you understand that, we'll be fine."
"We understand, and you have our word that we will tell no one besides Arwen and Gimli," Aragorn said. Legolas nodded his agreement.
Nodding in return, Lauren accepted their vow. "Well then, you may as well make yourselves comfortable, and we can get started." She thought up a soft, pillowed backrest, and leaned back comfortably. "Before we start looking at the stars and talking about the recent discoveries, there are a few basic concepts we have to get straight first. Gravity is a good place to start, I think."
"Gravity?" Legolas asked, testing the unfamiliar word.
"Yes, it's what causes things to fall to earth. There is a story that a mathematician named Newton came up with the concept when an apple fell from a tree, but I think it was a bit more complicated than that. When you shoot an arrow over a great distance, you have to aim above the target, right?" She used her hands to mime shooting an arrow upwards, above a target.
Legolas and Aragorn looked at her in surprise. "You are an archer?" Aragorn asked.
"No, I've never held a bow and arrow in my life, but I understand the physical concepts behind it. Now, as much as I love astronomy, physics was never my favorite subject, and I don't think I could explain it well, so I'm just going to gloss over a few things. But with an understanding of gravity and a few physics equations, you can predict the path of an arrow. All projectiles follow an arc, a curved path as gravity pulls the object down to earth. So, for shooting over distances, you must compensate for this downward pull, correct?"
They both nodded, having experienced this for themselves.
"Good, this downward pull is called gravity. It is an attractive force between any two bodies with mass. Now, the more massive object will exert a greater force than the less massive object. That is why an apple will fall toward the ground rather than toward the tree it came from. Both the tree and the ground exert a gravitational force on the apple, but the earth is so much more massive, that the attractive force of the tree doesn't seem to even exist.”
Aragorn frowned. He was not entirely sure about this concept, never having felt this attractive force to anything but the earth, but he didn't see how that had anything to do with the stars. He said so.
Lauren smiled. "Because it is this same force that controls the movement of the planets and the stars. This force extends far beyond the boundaries of our one world. And that brings us to the next major concept. This is a big one. The earth is not the center of the universe. In our solar system, the sun is the central point, and the earth and all the planets revolve around it."
They stared at her. Aragorn had heard her say this once before, but he still had trouble believing it.
"How can that be?" Legolas asked. "The earth does not move. We would feel it."
"Actually, that couldn't be further from the truth," Lauren said softly. She knew she was treading on dangerous ground, and didn't want to push this too far. "The earth is revolving around the sun and rotating on its axis. Gravity is the reason we don't feel the motion. The Earth is tilted on its axis, and this causes the change in the seasons. One revolution around the sun is one year. As the earth rotates on its axis, the sun and the stars seem to cross the sky. When the earth is rotated toward the sun, we have daylight. When the earth is rotated away from the sun, we have night."
She decided a visual aid would help get her point across better. She thought of a small three-dimensional model of the solar system, and one appeared in front of her, between her and the men. She pointed to the yellow ball in the middle of the model. "This is the sun." As she thought it, the model planets started moving, rotating on their individual axes. She pointed to the third planet from the sun with its moon revolving around it. "This is the earth and the moon, which is the only body that actually orbits the earth."
Aragorn and Legolas watched the motion of the bodies in the model. Legolas pointed to the other objects. "What are these?"
"Those would be the other planets. Earth is only one of nine planets in our solar system."
"So many?" Aragorn wondered. "You said they are like Earth?"
"Insofar that they are other worlds orbiting the sun, yes. None of them harbor life like Earth does." She pointed to each one in turn, starting with the closest one to the sun. "This is Mercury. It is a small, rocky world less than half the size of Earth. It is much too close to the sun to allow life to form. The normal temperature is about three times as hot as boiling water. There also isn't much of an atmosphere, which is what holds in gasses that allow life to develop."
She moved on to the next one, thinking this could be a little tricky. "This is Venus, the world that I believe you call Eärendil." Their gazes both shot to her face at that. Lauren tilted her head slightly as she looked at Aragorn. " Eärendil was related to you, right?"
Aragorn nodded. "Yes, he is Lord Elrond's father. He is half-elven, and long ago sailed to Valinor to ask for the Valar's help. He was not allowed to return to Middle-earth, but the Valar let him sail the skies in his ship with the bright light of a Silmaril at the bow. He descended from the skies with the great birds of heaven to help battle the dragons as the elves, Valar and men fought against Morgoth at the end of the first age. Eärendil slew the greatest of the dragons and cast him from the sky. I believe that you are a little confused. This planet that you call Venus can not possibly be Eärendil and his ship. "
"Eärendil is not simply a legend, as you apparently believe," Legolas said. "He is real, and his story is true. He was seen by many when he came to join the battle against Morgoth."
Lauren's brow wrinkled in thought. "OK, then, yes, I'm confused. I'm a person of science, and what I know about the planets is fact. There is no arguing that Venus is a planet. We have pictures of it. It has been there for as long as Earth has existed. It's not like something changed between then and now." She waved her hands to indicate her confusion.
"But something did change," Legolas said slowly. "After the kings of Númenor assailed Valinor, Ilúvatar removed Valinor from the world and placed it in the realm of hidden things. The world was greatly diminished from that point on."
Lauren followed Legolas' train of thought. "Perhaps it was not only Valinor that was hidden. If the world became more…ordinary, for lack of a better word, then a ship sailing the skies was probably also taken away. Has anyone seen him since that time?"
Aragorn and Legolas shook their heads. "Not in person," Aragorn added.
"Maybe they were pulled into another dimension, or a parallel reality," Lauren mused to herself. "I suppose that's possible. As much as a person sailing the vacuum of space in a wooden ship is possible." She looked back at them and didn't offer to explain the concepts of parallel realities. That would be a bit too much. "OK. I accept that at one time, the bright light in the sky referred to as the morning or evening star was Eärendil and his ship. Then he was hidden with Valinor. Now, that 'star' is Venus. Would you like to hear about it?"
They nodded, thinking that from her tone of voice, she didn't truly believe that Eärendil had ever sailed the skies as they knew to be true. But the explanation was enough to satisfy them, and they wanted to hear more about what the skies were like in her day and age.
"OK then," she said as she started her description. "Venus is the closest in size to Earth, and for a very long time, people thought that it might be a twin to Earth. A thick layer of clouds covers Venus, so no one knew what the surface might be like. It wasn’t until a few decades ago, when humans landed machines on the surface that we had any idea what lay beneath the clouds."
Their gazes once again locked on her face. "You have put machines on other worlds?" Legolas asked in amazement.
"Yes," she answered with a grin. "I told you that we've made a lot of discoveries in the last few decades. This is a very exciting time for astronomy. We have landed spacecraft on several of the worlds and moons in our solar system. The distances are far too vast to reach any other systems, but we're learning a lot more about our own neighborhood. I'll cover some more of those discoveries later, if that's all right?" They nodded slightly, and Lauren was a little concerned that she was telling them too much, too quickly. But they seemed willing to continue listening, so she went back to telling them about Venus.
"What they discovered amazed a lot of people. The surface temperature was higher than that of Mercury, though it was further away from the sun. The clouds apparently trap the heat of the sun, so the temperature is over four times that of boiling water. Wait a minute, I have an idea."
She gestured toward the suddenly darkened sky, and an image of Venus appeared there. They stared upward in amazement. They were truly looking at another world, as it was seen from space, and not from Earth. This was something they would never have expected to see.
"This is one of the pictures taken from a spacecraft orbiting Venus. You can see the thick clouds that I was talking about." She showed them several of the images of the planet taken from spacecraft that had landed on the surface.
"You already know that Earth is the next planet in the list, and I think you'll enjoy these images." She showed them images of Earth taken from space, and heard them both gasp beside her. "Pretty amazing, isn't it?" She showed them a few more, then showed them one taken from the surface of the moon. "We've actually had people walk on the moon," she told them. "The first people to walk on the moon were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, several years before I was born. As he stepped on to the surface for the first time, Neil Armstrong said words that have made their way into the collective human memory. 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' I've seen images of that moment. In fact, how about we watch that?" She leaned back and played the images of the moonwalk across the sky.
"That is a human?" Legolas asked as one of the men came into view. "Why does he look so odd, and why is he moving like that?"
"Those are spacesuits that protect them and allow them to breathe," Lauren explained. "There is no breathable atmosphere on the moon, so in order to breathe, they have to carry their oxygen in tanks. And since the moon is much less massive than the Earth, it doesn't have as strong of a gravitational pull. It's not easy to walk normally on the moon, so they do that kind of hopping motion."
Aragorn was silent as they watched the video, and Legolas turned to look at him. "What are you thinking?" he asked quietly.
"Mankind has achieved things we could never have dreamed of," Aragorn remarked.
"It's all a little overwhelming isn't it?" Lauren asked sympathetically. "By the time I was born, we already knew a lot about the solar system and the stars around us. I learned some of this in school as a child. It was just something I accepted and I guess I took it for granted. I never considered what it would be like to suddenly be told this without having the background that I had. Do you want me to stop?"
"No," Legolas said emphatically. "Lauren, you cannot tell us only this much and then stop. You said there were nine planets, and you have only told us of two others."
"Aragorn?" Lauren asked. She wanted to keep going, but would stop if it was making either of them too uncomfortable.
"Yes, please continue," he said. It was overwhelming, but like Legolas, he wanted to learn more.
"Very well," she said. "The next planet in the sequence is Mars. It's about half the size of Earth. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on with it right now. For many years, people have thought there might be alien life on Mars. Through telescopes, people have seen what they believed to be canals made by intelligent life, and features that appeared as if they had been made by liquid water. As we have learned more about Mars, it became evident that there is no intelligent alien life there, but there may once have been liquid water, so there is a possibility that life could have formed. The life that I'm talking about is not like the plant or animal life you may be thinking. It would be so small that you can't actually see it without a microscope, a device that magnifies the image. We have two rovers, machines named Sprit and Opportunity which are currently roaming the surface of the planet. They have sent back numerous images to Earth of the surface of Mars. They have been examining the make up of the soil and rocks that they find. I don't know exactly what discoveries they've made, but I can say that the exploration of this planet is making history."
She looked at the confused expressions on their faces. "Oops, I lost you a while back on that one, didn't I? Sorry. This is just such an exciting time for discoveries being made on this planet. The short version is that we have a chance of finding life on another planet for the first time. How about we move on to some of the images?" She projected some of the satellite images of Mars on the sky.
"What are all those circles?" Legolas asked as one of the images displayed.
"They're impact craters," Lauren explained. "Objects called asteroids and meteoroids fly around in the space between the planets, and they occasionally strike the planets. Those circular shapes are the result of an impact." She went on to show them other images of Mars and pointed out the features that indicated past liquid water on the surface.
Once she finished with Mars, she told them of the gas giant planets in the system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Aragorn and Legolas were amazed to find out how large these planets were. Aragorn's eyes widened in surprise when Lauren told them that the 'Great Red Spot' visible in Jupiter's atmosphere was a storm larger than Earth that had lasted for more than four hundred years. She showed them numerous images of the planets, the stripes of Jupiter's atmosphere, the rings of Saturn, and the blue colors of Uranus and Neptune. They asked many questions, and Lauren did her best to answer them and not confuse them. Once she had covered the most well known of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, she told them about Pluto, and its moon Charon. *
When she talked about Saturn, she had to tell them about Cassini, the satellite in orbit of Saturn and the Huygen's probe that it had very recently dropped to the surface of one of it's moons, Titan. She made sure not to go into detail about any of the discoveries, just mentioned that people were still studying the information that they were receiving from these instruments.
"Now, how about we finally get around to looking at the stars?" She thought about the night sky, and the last image that she had displayed vanished, to be replaced by a vista of the stars.
Legolas studied the stars for a moment. "The stars are wrong."
"What?" she asked. "Oh, you mean they're winter constellations and we're obviously in the summer? Well I love the winter constellations, but I hate the cold, so we're getting the best of both worlds."
"No, it is more than that," Legolas said. "This is not how the stars should look."
"Why don't you show me how they should look?" Lauren asked him.
Legolas looked back and forth between Aragorn and Lauren. "How do I do that?"
"Just concentrate on what you want to show us. The sky will change to mirror your thoughts." Lauren coached Legolas on how to alter their environment.
Legolas did as she asked, and the stars changed.
"Wow," she said in amazement as the sky filled with more stars than she had ever seen with the naked eye. "I don't think I've ever seen this many stars by simply looking up at the sky."
"Have some of the stars disappeared?" Aragorn asked in confusion.
"No," she explained. "They're still there, but we just can't see them. Light pollution is the bane of all ground based observing. We have so many cities in our world that the light given off by these cities tends to block out the fainter stars. You have to get away from any cities to truly be able to see the stars, and that's not always an easy thing to do." She studied the stars around her and began to see a few familiar constellations. Legolas was right, they weren't as she had expected them to be.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I feel like such an idiot. Of course the stars would appear different. There is a phenomenon called precession that affects where the stars seem to be. I told you about the axis that the Earth revolves around?" They nodded. "Well, that axis has a little bit of a wobble. It moves around like a child's top." She used her hand to demonstrate. "It takes 26,000 years for a full circle to be completed, and we apparently are at different places in that cycle."
Legolas nodded in understanding. "The change in the stars has been noticed by the elves before, especially the older ones, but we have never known how to explain the movement."
Lauren looked at him. "Well, I hope my explanation helped. Do you mind if I move things around a bit to how I see the sky? It will help with what I wanted to show you. I never really studied the Southern Hemisphere constellations, and I have a feeling that's what some of those are. I don't know enough about them to say anything."
"Do what you need to do," Legolas said.
"OK," she said as the sky changed back to the previous configuration. "You should still be able to recognize some of the constellations," she said. "They just might not be where you expect them to be." She pointed to Polaris. "That is called Polaris, the North Star. If you ever need to find the direction of north in my time, just find that star." She looked over to Legolas. "Why don't you see if you recognize anything and let me know."
Legolas pointed to a grouping of stars that seemed to form a large 'W'. That is Wilwarin, the butterfly."
Lauren smiled. "I know it as Cassiopeia, the Queen." She outlined the stars and continued. "That is supposed to look like a queen sitting on her throne."
Aragorn then gestured to another grouping of stars. "That is Menelmacar, the Swordsman of the Sky. He has long been my favorite constellation, ever since Elrond taught me of him."
Lauren favored him with a bright smile. "Me too. Orion the Hunter has always been my favorite constellation. Is this how you see him?" She used her hand to outline the stars that represented his legs, his shoulders, the three stars that made up his belt and the stars coming down from the belt for his sword, and the bow that he held in one hand.
"Yes," Aragorn said. "It is nice to see that some things do not change."
"I guess it's just easy to see a hunter in that grouping of stars. But my mom likes it for another reason."
"What is that reason?" Legolas asked.
Lauren started laughing. "We went to a planetarium when I was young. That's a place where people show others the stars in a domed building and teach them about the sky. The names of the constellations that we use were decided a long time ago. One of the people at the planetarium noted that if we had been naming the constellations today, we might have seen something much different. They suggested that we might see a very famous singer in that constellation by the name of Elvis. The legs and shoulders of course remained the same, but the bow he holds became an upraised arm holding a microphone, which is a device that amplifies the voice to be heard by a large number of people. The sword became the cord of the microphone, hanging down past his body. Now, my mom loved Elvis. He died some time ago, but she has always loved Orion after hearing him described as Elvis. Personally, I think I'll stick with thinking of him as an archer, a hunter, a protector. I used to look up at the sky and think he was there to protect me from harm. Of course, I was much younger when I thought that, but I've always had a soft spot for him since then."
She pointed to the red star at his shoulder. "That red star is called Betelgeuse. Literally translated, I think that means 'the armpit of the giant'. Not the prettiest of names, but you can see where they got the name. Betelgeuse is a red giant star. It's about a thousand times as large as our sun is. If you were to put Betelgeuse where the sun is, it would extend to about Jupiter's orbit, and the inner four planets would be consumed."
They went on in this manner for some time, sharing the names of the constellations and stars, along with any stories behind them or facts known about them. She told them that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky was actually a binary star, two stars orbiting each other, though only one was bright enough to be seen. The second star in the system was a white dwarf, a small dead star.*
"A dwarf star? Gimli will be pleased to know that some of the stars have been named after his people," Aragorn commented.
"If we tell him that it is a small, dead star, he will not be quite so honored," Legolas pointed out wryly.
"We do not have to tell him that part," Aragorn replied with a grin.
Once they had discussed most of the constellations that they all recognized, Lauren decided it was time to do something different. "I think it is time to switch gears and go look through the telescope," she said, standing up and moving over to the object they had almost forgotten about. Standing up, they stood near her and watched as she quickly set up the machine with easy, practiced moves. "Once the telescope is aligned, the computer knows where all the other objects in the sky should be," she explained. "I will warn you that what you will see in this telescope won't look like the pretty images we looked at earlier. Those pictures were taken by larger telescopes with better light gathering power and with longer exposures. And some of those images were taken from space, much closer to the target. But it will still be a closer look at some of these objects than you'd ever see with the naked eye."
She set the telescope to point at Venus. "There's Venus," she said, stepping back and gesturing for Legolas to look through the eyepiece.
He looked through the telescope, then looked back at her. "It looks like the crescent moon."
"Yes, with a telescope, you can see the phases of Venus, much like the phases of the moon. It's quite a bit smaller, though. Venus is much further away than the moon."
Aragorn took his turn next. He seemed a bit amazed that he was getting a closer look at the 'star' he had spent most of his life searching for whenever he looked into the sky. Lauren then turned the telescope toward Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. They were able to see the rings of Saturn and a few stripes in Jupiter's atmosphere, along with the four largest moons stretched out in a line around Jupiter. Aragorn remarked that they did look much different than the images she had shown them, and the colors of the atmospheres could not be seen.
Lauren had to remind them that the objects that recorded the images acted differently than the human eye. She grinned to herself at the looks of amazement and awe in their faces as they looked at the planets of the solar system for the first time. Once they had seen all of the planets that were visible through the small telescope, she showed them the double star Alberio. The bright blue color of one of the stars was clear in the eyepiece. She showed them the open star cluster of the Pleiades, the Orion and Crab nebulas, and the Andromeda galaxy. They spent more than an hour just pointing the telescope at anything they could find and exclaiming at what they could see. But the most amazing thing for them was when she turned the telescope on the full moon. They were able to see details of the dark regions called the marias, or the 'seas', the numerous craters and the mountains. It was a long time before they would turn away from the telescope, and they did so reluctantly only when Lauren promised to show them better images of the objects they had seen through the telescope.
As they settled back onto the blanket, Lauren realized what was missing from her observing session. "We need some hot chocolate," she declared. "While I realize the temperature is warmer than usual, I always have a thermos of hot chocolate on hand for my observing sessions. Would you like some as well?"
Aragorn and Legolas looked at each other, then back to her. "And what would that be?" Aragorn asked.
"A hot drink usually made with a combination of milk and powdered chocolate," she explained.
"What is chocolate?" Legolas asked.
She stared at them, aghast. "You don't know what chocolate is? You poor deprived people! Chocolate is manna from heaven, ambrosia from the gods, edible bliss."
The men had to laugh at her enthusiasm. "Well, I would not pass up a chance to taste something that could inspire that reaction," Aragorn said, still chuckling.
She thought for a minute. "OK, we'll have hot chocolate, but we have to have something else with it. Do you both like fruit and nuts?"
"Yes," Legolas said, confused. "Are we going to be eating those with the drink you have proposed?"
"Yes," she said. "But they won't be quite as you expect."
A tray appeared in their midst. Aragorn and Legolas leaned forward and studied it. There was a pitcher sitting on it with three cups, a collection of cookies with dark spots in them, a bowl of small dark, round objects, and a pile of strawberries covered in a dark smooth substance. They looked back at her and waited for her explanation.
"So I got a little carried away," she shrugged. "There are strawberries dipped in chocolate, chocolate covered nuts, and chocolate chip cookies." She picked up the insulated pitcher and carefully poured three cups of the hot chocolate. "Be careful, it's hot." Bringing her cup to her lips, she closed her eyes and inhaled the steam. After blowing gently across the surface of the drink, she took a tentative sip. Finding the temperature to be just as she liked it, she took a deeper drink and sighed in pleasure. "That really hits the spot." She opened her eyes to see their reactions as they took their first sip.
After the first tentative sip, their eyes widened. "That is very sweet," Aragorn commented. He licked his lips and took another drink. "I have never tasted anything quite like this."
Legolas did not comment, but took a deeper drink of his own. Lauren smirked at the rapturous look on his face. It appeared that another chocoholic was born. "I agree. This is delicious," he finally said, before reaching for a chocolate covered strawberry. "I did not believe it possible, but this is even better," he said after the first taste.
For the next few minutes, they tried everything on the tray, finding that they loved everything offered. Lauren had to re-fill the tray before they were satisfied enough to sit back and go back to looking at the sky. With a cup of hot chocolate in hand, Lauren leaned back against the pillows she had conjured earlier.
"The next set of images are of objects called nebulas." She pointed back up toward the sky, and the men reclined to better see the image. They gazed in awe at the wispy, brilliantly colored clouds that appeared above them. The complex patterns and different shapes of each nebula caught the eye and made them lean closer as if for a better look. The bright colors appeared as gems against the black sky behind them.
She pulled up images of the great dark pillars in the Eagle Nebula standing out as dark shapes against a blue-green background, and the great expanse of glowing gases in the Orion Nebula, a fantast mixture of pinks, oranges, browns and greens. There were circular planetary nebulas like the Helix and Ring Nebulas, a central circle of blue surrounded by circles of orange and red. She showed them pictures of the pastel colors and intricate patterns in the Cat's Eye nebula, as well as objects with names like the Rosette, Egg and Hourglass nebulas with their vivid colors and complex shapes. Each image was as breathtaking as the previous one, and she told them what she knew of each one as she showed it upon the sky. Their reactions were all that she could have hoped for. They were lost in the images and the beauty that existed far beyond the confines of their world.
"All of the things that I showed you are fairly local things," she told them. "They are within our own galaxy. Now I told Aragorn a little about this, but I don't think I mentioned this to you, Legolas. We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way galaxy. This galaxy is very large."
She took a deep breath and began to try to explain just how large the galaxy was. "A light year is a unit of measurement specified as the distance that light can travel in one year. One light year is approximately 6 trillion miles, so that would be about 2 trillion leagues. By the way, that would be a two with twelve zeros following it. The nearest star is over four light years away, and our galaxy is one hundred and twenty thousand light years across." She grinned at the dumbfounded look on their faces. "I know, the distances are mind-boggling. I don't even truly have the faintest idea how far that is, but I wanted you to have some idea of the scale of the objects we'll be looking at. Our galaxy is just one of many, and most of them have billions of stars. But the best way to do this is just to show you some of them."
An image of a beautiful, majestic spiral galaxy appeared over their heads, and both man and elf gasped at the sight. "That's the Pinwheel galaxy," she told them. "It's a spiral galaxy. Can you see the separate arms?" They nodded. She went on to show them pictures of the Andromeda, Sombrero, and several unnamed galaxies, all with distinct bright spiral arms arcing gracefully away from a central mass.
When she brought up a picture of the Mice galaxies, Legolas asked why the shape was not like that of the others. The image she had just showed them did not have a tight spiral structure, but looked as if some of the spirals had been thrown out away from the central part of the galaxy, as if they were coming unwound.
"There are many instances of galaxy interactions," Lauren explained. "When two galaxies get close to each other, their gravity affects each other and like you can see in this image, there is often a 'tidal tail'. The galaxies get distorted by the close interaction." She showed them pictures of more interacting galaxies, the Whirlpool, Tadpole and the Antennae galaxies with their spiral cores being trailed by a long, bright tail and bright blue star clusters.
Then she showed them what she thought of as the ultimate image. "This is a picture of a very small section of sky called the 'Hubble Ultra Deep Field'." They gasped anew as they saw in that small section of sky thousands of galaxies, showing up as only small smudges of light, some showing the same spiral structure she had shown them earlier. "I love this image," she commented softly. "If none of those other images did it, this one truly lets us see the magnitude, the magnificence of God or Ilúvatar's creation. It has been estimated that there are about one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. In this image alone, there are about ten thousand."
"Does that not make you feel incredibly small?" Aragorn asked as he stared deeply into the image.
"In a way," Lauren allowed. "But it just makes me hungrier for knowledge, really. I want to know what's out there. In all of that, I don't think we could possibly be the only living creatures, do you? There are an unknown number of planets in other systems out there. In the last ten years, since the first extra-solar planet was discovered, scientists have detected over one hundred and fifty of them. The ones we have discovered so far are all gas giant planets, like Jupiter.* We don't expect to find life on those, but as the technology improves, we may be able to see planets of similar size to Earth. We're a very curious people, you see. We want to know what is out there, if we're alone in our neighborhood, or if there is intelligent alien life somewhere. In my opinion, there has to be intelligent alien life out there in that vast universe, we just haven't been able to find it yet."
"Alien life?" Aragorn asked. "If you find it, will you travel to meet it?"
"Not in my lifetime," Lauren exclaimed. "And not for a very long time to come. We don't have the technology to do anything like that right now. If you'll remember, the furthest we've had manned missions is to the moon. At that, we only had a handful of people visit the moon, and none for years. Right now, the only reason we have people going into space is because of the International Space Station."
"What is that?" Legolas asked his now very familiar question.
"It's an orbiting station that is manned at the moment by two astronauts. It usually has a complement of three people, but after the Columbia accident, the shuttles haven't been in use."
When her statement met two very blank looks, she hurried to explain. "Sorry. The space shuttles are the vehicles used by my country to put people in space and bring them back home. In February of 2003, a couple of years ago, as they were returning, the shuttle Columbia broke up in the atmosphere. All seven astronauts were killed. It was a horrible accident."
"Seven men died and you are still sending men into space?" Aragorn asked, aghast.
"The exploration of space is a risky business," Lauren explained. "Those aboard Columbia were not the first astronauts to die. It is always a tragedy that is mourned by the nation and the world at large. But in determining what caused the accident, we can fix the problem and make the next flight a safer one. I truly admire people who can go into space knowing what risks they may be facing. And by the way, not all those on the shuttle were men. Two women were also aboard."
"Women?" Aragorn asked in amazement.
Lauren's eyes narrowed as she looked at him. "While there are still a few jobs that are not allowed for women, we have the ability to work alongside men at whatever we choose to do. I knew as I grew up that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Do you have a problem with that?"
"No," Aragorn said. "I respect women and know them to be very capable. But in my time, no man would knowingly send a woman into a dangerous situation."
"Being an astronaut is a great honor, and something that people have to go through much training to achieve. If a woman is able to complete the training and has skills necessary for the job, why should she be prevented from going into space?" she asked seriously.
Aragorn inclined his head, granting her the point. "She should not," he said, knowing that Lauren would not accept any other response.
"You have people in space right now?" Legolas asked in fascination.
"At least two," Lauren explained. "And it shouldn't be much longer before the shuttles are operating as normal again. They've had one successful flight so far, but still have a few problems to work out. Once all the problems are fixed, we'll have a few more people going back and forth. Maybe then they'll be able to service Hubble." The last line was spoken nearly under her breath.
"What was that?" Aragorn asked.
She sighed as she looked over at Aragorn. "You know all those fantastic pictures I was showing you? Most of them were taken by one amazing piece of technology. The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit since 1990, about fifteen years now. It's made some amazing discoveries in that time. Besides taking some of the most gorgeous pictures anyone has ever seen, it has helped us figure out the answers to many questions. We now know the age of the universe, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the existence of dark energy, how galaxies evolve, that super-massive black holes are in the centers of most galaxies and it has helped us find a lot of those extra-solar planets I told you about earlier. But it needs servicing. There are several parts that need replaced. If Hubble doesn't get serviced soon, the telescope could stop functioning sometime in the next three to five years. Before the shuttle accident there was a mission planned to go up and replace the aging parts and replace a couple of the cameras as well. Once the shuttles were grounded, the mission was put on hold. That's fine, we want the shuttles to be safe for our astronauts. The telescope is great, but the safety of the astronauts has to come first. But now that it looks like the shuttles are going to fly again, they need to put a servicing mission back on the docket. There has been a lot of debate over the last couple of years as to whether or not that would happen; but in my humble opinion, it would be a tragedy to simply let the telescope die without some attempt being made to keep it functioning for years to come. Who knows what we'll discover next?" *
As she got more and more worked up about the telescope, her concentration slipped, and the radio suddenly started blaring her more normal style of music. At first, she didn't even notice, merely incorporated the beat of the music into the pattern of hand gestures she was making to emphasize her point. It wasn't until she looked over at Legolas and saw his hands clamped firmly over his ears that she realized what had happened. With that realization, the music just as suddenly cut off completely.
"Sorry," she apologized sheepishly. "When I get going on certain topics, I really get going. Are you OK?"
Legolas slowly removed his hands from his ears and looked at her. "I will be fine, but I begin to see what Aragorn meant about your musical tastes."
"I told you so," Aragorn muttered in satisfaction.
Lauren laughed and shook her head slightly. "Fine, your point has been made. But I still hold that my music is not all that bad. It's just different than what you're used to."
"That much is true," Aragorn allowed. "We have never heard anything like your music."
"So what is your music like?" Lauren asked in curiosity. "I can hardly say whether it is better than mine if I've never heard it, now can I?"
Aragorn and Legolas looked at each other. "Why don't you sing for us, Legolas?" Aragorn asked. "Show Lauren what elven music is like."
"You could join me," Legolas said.
"And have you complain that I do not do the song justice? I think not." Aragorn crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Legolas with a raised eyebrow.
Legolas smiled at Aragorn. While it was true that elven music did not sound quite the same coming from a human, Aragorn well knew that Legolas' complaints had been made in jest. But, having made them, he could not now insist that Aragorn join him. Legolas nodded in acknowledgment to Aragorn and watched as Aragorn and Lauren made themselves comfortable. After a moment, he decided to start with a traditional elven melody, A Elbereth Gilthoniel. He thought it an appropriate song, as it was about the stars in the heavens.
Lauren reclined back against her pillows and closed her eyes, letting the sound of Legolas' voice wash over her. It truly was like nothing she had ever heard before. The elven song was beautiful, ethereal and otherworldly as it drifted on the air. A tear slipped out from beneath her closed lids, but she paid it no mind and let herself float away into the music.
Aragorn noticed the rapt expression on her face and nudged Legolas. Legolas looked at her and smiled before closing his own eyes and losing himself to the music. As the song ended, he shifted smoothly to another, singing songs of the stars, nature, the heavens, and the Valar. He sang for a long time, his voice the only sound to be heard. The last song he sang was of the fading of the elves as their time on Middle-earth ended. As the last note drifted away, Legolas opened his eyes and looked back to Aragorn.
Aragorn had a relaxed smile on his face. Listening to Legolas sing always had a calming effect on him, no matter what situation they found themselves in. Aragorn gestured to Lauren. She lay still with her eyes closed. "I think you sang her to sleep," Aragorn commented.
"Hardly." Her voice was soft and faraway. "I don't know how anyone could sleep through that." She sat up slowly and shook her head as if rousing herself from a trance. "That was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. I can see why you might consider my music to be harsh. I thank you Legolas. You have given me a gift that I will never forget. That music will stay with me for the rest of my life."
They simply stared at her for a moment. That was not her normal behavior at all.
Legolas nodded in acceptance of her praise. Humans were often amazed at the beauty of elven music when they first heard it.
She noticed Aragorn staring and smiled self-consciously. "If I believed in magic, I think I'd accuse you of putting a spell on me, Legolas. After this, I may just start believing in magic again. I used to, when I was a child." Her voice was wistful as she spoke the last line.
Aragorn couldn't help but laugh. "Gimli was worried that you had put a spell on me, and you claim Legolas has bewitched you. I seem to be surrounded by those with magical gifts."
"Gimli thought I had put a spell on you?" Lauren asked, confused. "Why? I certainly don't have any magical abilities."
"I would not say that," Legolas said, gesturing to the sky where she had shown the images of the universe. "You managed to open our eyes to an entire universe that we did not know existed. We should be thanking you."
Lauren shook her head, and waved a hand dismissively. A smile lit her face, though as she replied. "Fine. You're welcome. I'm glad to share what knowledge I have. Do you have any other questions that I might be able to answer?"
"How old is the universe?" Legolas asked, thinking back to a question that he had wondered about earlier when she was talking about the telescope named Hubble, but had not had the chance to ask.
"The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Much older than even the most ancient elf, I'm sure." She looked at Aragorn and noticed that he was becoming transparent. "Is it morning already?"
Aragorn looked down and noticed the same thing. "We shall see you again tonight." He glanced over at the tray and quickly grabbed a strawberry, shoving it into his mouth before he lost the ability to interact with the dream world. "Thank you for that, as well," he said, grinning widely.
Legolas tried to imitate his last minute grab, but found that he was already too insubstantial. As Aragorn woke up, Legolas faded as well. The disappointment on his face caused Lauren to start giggling. "Don't worry, I'll supply more tomorrow," she said as they faded away completely.
Lauren sighed at finding herself alone again. She lay back down and turned on the radio. Instead of her normal music, Legolas' voice once more filled the night. "Now I just have to figure out how to entertain them tomorrow," she muttered. "I've tapped out my astronomy knowledge. So what else would interest them?" Closing her eyes in thought, she absently picked up a chocolate chip cookie and listened to the music of the elves as a smile spread across her face.
*A/N: Since this story was written in 2005, a few new discoveries have been made in astronomy. I did not change them in the story, since the character is living in 2005, but I felt I needed to include an update of that information. In the winter of 2005, Pluto was discovered to have two smaller moons, which were named Nix and Hydra in the spring of 2006. The bright star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major has been discovered to be a triple star system rather than a double star system. The smallest extra-solar planet found to date is about five times larger than Earth and orbits a red dwarf star. And the most exciting of all, the Space Shuttle Discovery has just had a successful launch on July 4th, 2006. This is the second successful launch since the Colombia accident in 2003, and one of the astronauts on the shuttle will stay on the International Space Station, brining the crew complement up to three. Assuming that the shuttles start normal flight operations again, a Hubble servicing mission is scheduled and is a priority for NASA.
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