When I started writing this book I was flying blind with respect to the science aspect of my science fiction novel, A Place Between. But somewhere around the third draft, I decided it was time to start doing some research to see if the things I had written were in the right galaxy. *wink* When I started looking I found so many coincidences, or synchronicities, I couldn’t believe it.

Maybe I didn’t randomly choose the name Nibiru for my planet, and NASA really does say it isn’t real.

This connection just showed up in my news feed-- NASA refutes the existence of Nibiru. I got chills at the headline and was so confused because that is the name I had chosen months before for the “ideal Earth” planet in my book. I chose it, literally, from a list of ancient civilizations and I had no idea it was at the center of numerous doomsday conspiracies. In my story, the establishment (and most normal people) don’t believe in Nibiru either, so it was really fun to have video of NASA scientists debunking it. It felt like the story was coming to life.

Black holes really could swallow earth? Yikes.

Then there was this article about a black hole that is swallowing our galaxy. Ok, my storyline of a black hole swallowing Earth might be a bit far fetched (we should all hope) but it was surprising to me to find out it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. And there is also this video about a black hole that is tearing through space, ready to collide with another black hole (mass destruction ensues). But what if it collided with Earth instead and what if its trajectory wasn’t random. What if it was being manipulated? I thought these questions were really out there, but it maybe it’s more of a hop of the path instead of a leap.

Of course, the likelihood of Earth getting sucked up by a black hole is immeasurably small, but now I know that someone has measured it and it’s not zero. That’s enough for me to hang a shred of science on for the rest of the fiction.

Still more about black holes because they are awesome…

And one of my favorite articles about black holes, is this one, that explain Hawking’s theory that black holes don’t end in a point, instead they are passageways to other universes. In A Place Between I write that Earth could come out of the black hole but instead of being in another universe it would come out in a different time.

Earth really does have many moons? Or maybe it’s mini-moons…

In A Place Between, there are two moons because part of Earth broke off and formed a second moon. I didn’t expect to find any articles about Earth having more than one moon but I did. Apparently there are mini-moons circling Earth that are mostly small but every 100,000 years or so maybe there is one the size of a school bus.

There is music actually music in space...

I already knew about the space sounds NASA has recorded but love the fact that the planets and moons make sounds, so it makes the list. Who is to say there isn’t more music in space? Maybe music that only some of us can hear.

A Place Between includes some of this NASA audio. Here is one of my favorites that made its way into the book, the song of Miranda, one of the 27 moons of Uranus. Skip to minute 3:30 or so.

Do these coincidences mean anything? No probably not, but they remind me that this universe is so much vaster, more complicated, and stranger than most people believe and that is a wonderful fact to me. We really have no idea what is out there and, for some reason, I like that.

Sometimes the research does back up the writing