Out of Orbit

fictionspawn Aak, ,

Watching the stars. Aak fictionspawn

-It’s fucking freezing tonight, I said as we walked down the street. We were both tired, it had been a hard weekend. -It shouldn’t be this cold in October.

I know! It’s too fucking cold to be real. I wasn’t cold this afternoon.

Dan looked up to the sky. -Fuck.

-What’s wrong?

-The sky. The stars. They… It sounds crazy, but they are different. They stand different.

I looked up. He was right. The Ursa Major seemed to be upside down or something. All the stars were just in the wrong place. The strangest part was they were moving. Slowly I could see stars disappear in the horizon.

-What the fuck is going on?

A sun was coming up. A small sun, moving at visible speed. It was the same sun as always. The temperature kept falling.

-The world, I said. -It’s out of orbit.

We stood there for, watching the sky. Looked at each other. Then back at the sky.

-Now what do we do?

-We better get home. I’m freezing to death.

We hurried down towards Dan’s house. The cold was unbearable. I could feel a stinging sensation in my face. My body was shivering.

-Wait! Said Dan. I… I can’t… He sat down by a fence.

-We got to move, I said. We can’t stay here.

-I just need to relax a little. Besides, what use is it anyway. There no where to run.

A planet was rising over the treetops. It had to be Saturn or something. Majestic. Beautiful. I fell down beside Dan. I felt sleepy. Very sleepy. I wasn’t cold anymore. I was warm. As Saturn passed over the night sky i fell asleep never to wake up again as our planet continued out into deep space.

 

I guess this story isn’t really scientifically accurate, but these articles probably are:

https://phys.org/news/2014-11-earth-orbit-sun.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wandering-in-the-void-billions-of-rogue-planets-without-a-home/

Here’s one of my older stories, less accurate still:

Aether

Published by fictionspawn Aak

Norwegian trilingual writer and illustrator. Contact information in my Gallery.

41 Comments

  3. Great story and great illustration, Aak. Indeed, getting the Earth out of its orbit will not happen in a single fast go. This would require a huge amount of energy … and there would not be much life after that. There will be centuries long oscillations. But to have it accelerated is really nice. Many thanks !

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      1. It may not necessarily be an impact, Aak. It may also be a chaotic resonance between the existing planets. Planet and satellite orbits look very stable. They are stable indeed, otherwise … but there are plenty of significant variations. I wonder if any ever tried a series of long dynamic simulations of the Sun system ? Anyway, very many thanks for the story, Aak !

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  7. Yeah, if enough force acted upon the Earth to send it out of orbit, the effects wouldn’t be subtle. In fact, it would probably rip half the atmosphere away and kill us all before we had to worry about being cold.

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      1. It would be a lot more complicated. First off, let’s say a small, rogue black hole was passing through our solar system, definitely an object with enough mass to knock Earth out of orbit if it got within a certain distance.

        It would affect the orbits of everything else as it approached, so we’d know something was coming, even if we couldn’t observe it directly. Chances are, we’d have advance warning and at the same time, couldn’t do one damn thing about it.

        Even if our government chose to withhold the information, sooner or later Wikileaks or some other source would leak the info. Worldwide panic would ensue, there’d be mass suicides, all religions with an “end of the world” scenario would become very apparent and influencial (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have their versions of the Messiah), and in the end, the mass earthquakes, supertides, and other effects upon our planet as the object approached would probably kill hundreds of millions if not billions, even before the Earth started to break up (depending on how close the object came).

        It would be the stuff of disaster novels.

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  8. If Sol were to pop out of existence… Vanish. And that sun you saw was the camera-flash of it dying to nothing… Then yeah, we’d prolly not realize it, well, at night we might not. We’d still be rotating, and the Moon would have a little trouble keeping up…

    Fun thoughts. Let’s make it happen.

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      1. Earth around the sun, 110,000 kilometers / hour. If the sun suddenly weren’t there, zoom off we’d go. Past the Moon’s orbit in a few hours. Past Mar’s orbit in a few weeks. And in a year, IceBall Earth would get past Jupiter. Nothing would strip away our atmosphere. (Well, slowly it would get peeled away like an onion skin.) And Earth’s oceans would all freeze over. And only volcanoes would harbor terrestrial life.
        Kind of a cool Sci-Fi story.

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  11. I like their appreciation of the beauty of Saturn even as they slowly freeze to death. Scientific accuracy is not required – great story!
    Brings to mind that old 1970s programme Space 1999 (which was the moon leaving orbit, but still!).

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  12. My first thought was of the falling Chinese space lab…then I realised that we are the ones falling slowly, dancing to the belly of the Universe. So….where are we heading? 😉

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  15. It’s funny because just today, my co-worker and I were talking about how cold it is. Some snow fell and for a second there we wondered if it wasn’t December. So when I read your story, I felt a bit eerie.

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