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Science fiction short story taking place in a universe with a higher gravitational constant



I read this story online, maybe 2 years ago. It was about a group of people (the size of a village IIRC) who somehow got transported to another universe, where the gravitational constant was orders of magnitude higher than ours.


The funky consequences of this were explored in the story -- I remember a scene where someone put their hand near a local lifeform to feel its gravitational field. Stars were much smaller and shorter lived due to the dramatically increased gravity. The people lived on a "lifeboat" in orbit around a star, which IIRC was a few km across and had a lifespan of a few years. A major plot point was the fact that they needed to move to another star, because theirs was nearing the end of its lifespan. In the end, they succeed to do just this.



Answer



Raft, by Stephen Baxter. First in the Xeelee sequence. From Wikipedia:



The novel is an elaborated version of his 1989 short story of the same title, Raft. The story follows a group of humans who have accidentally entered an alternate universe where the gravitational force is far stronger than our own, a "billion" times as strong. Planets do not exist, as they would immediately collapse under their own gravity; stars are only a mile across and have extremely brief life-spans, becoming cooled kernels a hundred yards wide with a surface gravity of five g. Human bodies possess a "respectable" gravity field in and of themselves. "Gravitic chemistry" also exists, where gravity is the dominant force on an atomic scale.



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