Prologue
It was an unusual asteroid.
It was made up of two, solid iron and nickel, mountain range-sized chunks of rock that orbited each other like a mini solar system. It—or perhaps they—had an eccentric orbit around the sun that took it far out of the ecliptic plane and back again every 319 years.
The asteroid looked, acted and had a composition not far outside the norm. It was a celestial object that looked benign when viewed from afar. But ominously it carried vast kinetic potential that promised destruction on an unimaginable scale for any other solar system resident unfortunate enough to get in its way.
One of the celestial partners looked vaguely like a misshapen pear. Its long axis spanning approximately thirty miles. Its smaller partner’s more normal shape had a diameter a bit over six miles and was as nearly spherical as an asteroid could be. Its heavily dimpled surface had been cratered by thousands of encounters with other solar system debris over innumerable eons, causing it to resemble an ill-defined golfball.
The pear’s surface dust—as is the case with most asteroids—was not thick and consequently its albedo, or brightness, was relatively high. The golfball’s on the other hand was for some strange astronomical quirk, the opposite. Its layer of dust was improbably and impenetrably thick. Its ultra-low albedo made it something like a spherical slate blackboard. Drifting through the solar system it virtually sucked up—instead of reflecting—whatever photons of light happened to come its way.
The asteroid couple was ultimately separated by one of the countless cosmological encounters that had governed its life for hundreds of millions of years. Another single but much larger asteroid strayed too close. Its stronger gravitational influence caused the pear and golf ball’s orbits around each other to become progressively out of sync. The two began to drift closer to each other causing the orbital speed of the smaller golf ball to greatly increase. Over the course of unknown time their astral ballet around each other deteriorated further. Finally, the golf ball broke free and was hurled away from its partner at a much higher velocity. The pear, now unfettered by its partner’s mass, settled into a radically new orbit around the sun. In a few dozen millennia, it would crash into Jupiter leaving an ugly black stain in the multi-hued, striated clouds of the gas giant.
The golf ball, however, managed to stabilize itself into a new orbit that was strangely enough nearly the same as its old. Only a few, tiny arc-seconds separated old from new. On the grand scale of the solar system it was a nearly infinitesimal two hundred thousand miles of difference at any point in its new orbit. Overall, the distance meant nearly nothing when compared to the hundreds of millions of miles of its orbital journey through the solar system and its environs.
And so, having lost its symbiotic relationship with the pear and gained a new orbit of seeming insignificance, it began its new solitary life around the Sun.
