Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun. Which leads to speculation about the root cause of some large comet/asteroid impacts, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about.
And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.
But they’ve found nothing. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe.
It was Stephen Hawking who first proposed that the missing dark matter may be in the form of invisible “primordial” black holes that were formed when our universe itself was created in the Big Bang (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/418126/why-black-holes-may-constitute-all-dark-matter/).
Primordial black holes might have formed when Big Bang created a super-dense soup of particles, with densities high enough to spontaneously form black holes. Recent research results using the Kepler satellite have restricted the size range of possible “black hole dark matter” candidates, but it is still a viable theory.
Some theorists think it’s possible that these intermediate-sized primordial black holes coalesced into the super-giant black holes that form the cores of galaxies, with the left over matter of the universe cooling around these to form stars. If so, some of these primordial black holes might still be wandering the cosmos, ejected at high speeds from galactic cores during the process of merger by something called gravitational recoil.
Perhaps farfetched, but perhaps not—truth is often stranger than fiction—and this is the story of Nomad.
I hope you enjoyed it, and that you continue the adventure in Sanctuary, book two of the Nomad trilogy.
All the best,
Matthew Mather July 27th, 2015
PS: Feel free to email me with questions at [email protected]
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Nomad Video and Simulation
To see Matthew Mather running a 3D physics simulation of the Nomad encounter, just search for “Mather Nomad Simulation” on YouTube or click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X11yMkLUzCY
If you want to run your own physics simulation of Nomad, that’s easy too! The folks at Universe Sandbox have amazingly provided the tools to the general public. Just search for “Universe Sandbox” online and follow the instructions for loading their software (it is a full, 3D physics-based model of the solar system). The cost is $25. Once you have it loaded, click the top left of the screen to access the menu, then click “Open Existing Simulation, ” select “Fiction,” and click the “Nomad” tab to start the simulation. Or, just search for the “How to Run Nomad Simulation” video on my YouTube channel.