Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Praise for Star Dragon

"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine

"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review

"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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The Secret of the Dark in the Light?

June 19th, 2008

Space.com reports on searches for axions, a so-far hypothetical particle that could account for the so-called non-baryonic dark matter.

According to one idea, axions are produced in the core of the sun, like neutrinos, and like neutrinos, can change fly straight out of the sun and also change their form into photons. The new research reports results studying X-rays from the magnetic fields around the sun, X-rays that might be the result of axions interacting with the magnetic fields and being converted into photons.

But like so much in the dark matter search, the results have been negative so far.

We’re a long way from being done search for and detecting dark matter. While we’re pretty certain it’s there and can see its effects in many different ways (keep that in mind when proposing a simple alternative like modifying Newtonian gravity, which fails to account for some observations), we need an experimental detection to give us a clue to what the stuff actually is.

In Spider Star, I postulated seventeen distinct types of dark matter, only naming a couple (e.g., “aetherons” that were WIMPs pushed around by a stardrive named “Bully” for interstellar propulsion). We already know one type of dark matter, the neutrino, although its mass is too small to be much of the dark matter in the universe. When the neutrino, again like the axion, was proposed to balance out some nuclear equations, it wasn’t clear that it would be detectable.

It’s possible that astrophysics is facing a real life example of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, in which there are truths that cannot be proven from first principles.

Don’t hold your breath yet, though. We haven’t been at this long in the grand scheme of things. A century ago physicists were still arguing about whether or not atoms were real and you couldn’t really say that quantum mechanics even existed.

We could perhaps use a new name for dark matter, however. It gives people the wrong impression, especially if we look for it in the bright light of the sun. I have a similar problem with my quasar work — the most luminous objects in the universe are powered by their hearts of darkness, super massive black holes.

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