Andrea Caputo

In 2034, a rocket leaves a spaceport with an unusual payload: two spheres the size of a large globe, each weighing nearly a ton. No engines, no electronics. Just a mirrored surface of hundreds of corner-cube reflectors — tiny prisms that return light exactly to where it came from. This is the future space tuning fork.

1799 kilometers per second — that's the speed at which star S5-HVS1 is permanently leaving the galaxy. 4.8 million years ago, it was ejected from the center of the Milky Way during a close encounter with the supermassive black hole Sgr A*.

The orchestra plays, though no one sees the conductor. The musicians are charged particles in the pulsar's magnetosphere, and the score is the electric and magnetic fields generated by the spinning superdense star.