Chapter I
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THE DEATH OF A STAR
Even at three light-days distance, the scene was almost supernatural.
Sanduleak, an eleven million year-old star, had evolved into a blue super giant, shining with the power of a hundred thousand suns inside the Tarantula Nebulae.
Flaming tongues burst on its surface like serpents, luminous serpents reaching out hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space. Everything was tiny, minuscule—a nothing next to the star. She was the absolute queen of the nebulae in Magellan Cloud.
Sanduleak was a different star. With eighteen times the mass of our own sun and a diameter that could fill the entire orbit of the Earth, she had consumed all her nuclear fuel quickly. Stars like her live a short time, but compensate for their short life span by living intensely, brilliantly, like mythological beings. Their brightness is so powerful that they obscure any other object within a radius of countless light-years. They are creators of life, nuclear ovens where vital elements are cooked and the absolute essence of life is detailed. Sanduleak was a cosmic mother, ready to explode, spreading the seeds of her womb.
In successive layers, she had manufactured denser and denser chemical elements, beginning with helium, carbon and oxygen and building up to the heaviest, nickel and iron.
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