Keep me in distant sight

Chapter 5 : to the place between the twilight and the dawn

When you're a kid and they tell you about space, they use pretty pictures and graphs. First, you see some kind of circle with the Sun at the center and other planets orbiting around it. If you are really curious and want to dig more, you might come across the official pictures taken in the past centuries: the scorched Mercury, the Venus' coffee-cream color, Mars' iron red hue, Jupiter's storms, Saturn's rings, Uranus' fuzzy teal, Neptune's royal blue. You look at all the pretty colors with stars in your eyes, smiling like the child you are because they are all so beautiful, like jewels. Then, your fascination either fades or it takes root in your brain and heart until you're a forest of knowledge about everything contained within the Universe. It starts during your childhood. You know they are more than planets : dwarfs planets, moons, asteroids belts, telluric planets, gaseous planets, icy giants, a gigantic cloud on the far border of the solar system and even more. If you get real good, you can name the main jovians moons and the saturnians' as well, from Callisto to Titan, from Enceladus to Europa. After all this, you might be the most knowledgeable kid around but there are still so many things to learn. You have barely scratched the surface - it's time for you to choose if you want to pursue your search or quench your thirst. If you go forward, the world of hundreds of moons and several lists of widely different stellar objects open their paths to you. But you're still within the little crib of the solar system. You will have to wait until your early teenage years to learn the basics of what lies beyond our system : black holes, pulsars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, all the stars and their different sizes and more, always more.

Then the world of exoplanets explodes in front of you and you become a kid all over again when you learn the incredible worlds that exist far away from your home : worlds made of hard graphite and diamond, ocean worlds with seas several hundred kilometers deep, frozen worlds, burning worlds, stars of all sizes and colors, stars that had come to life recently and ones that would complete thousands of billions of orbits around the Milky Way before vanishing, galaxies and dust and gas clouds and before you realize it, every little thing about those faraway worlds make your heart beat faster. The deeply rooted childlike wonder never left you.

In spite of the wonder, there are some disappointments. The stunning galaxies you have in pictures aren't really like that. A lot of them emit light in a spectrum invisible to the human eyes, so in reality, your Universe is rather dark. It's okay, you tell yourself. Even if the pictures are a mix of several spectrums, they are still gorgeous.

Your solar system isn't flat : it's orbiting around the center of the Milky Way, which means its trajectory is more a less a really, really wide orbit of 240 millions of years and the Sun pulls its system with it. It's not circular, either - with the shape taken by the solar winds, it kind of looks like a rugby ball.

However, one thing remains unimaginable. Despite all the knowledge you accumulate during your life, all the numbers you learn by heart and count, you will never truly know the reality of it all.

You will never fully understand how wide the Universe is. The graphs are false - in between two planets, the distance is wider than you could ever imagine. If you took the largest star of your Universe, the monstrous UY Scuti (a red supergiant) and placed it inside the solar system instead of your Sun, then it wouldn't even touch Saturn's orbit. That's how wide your solar system is.

Even light, the quickest thing existing in your Universe, can't close the gap between two objects so easily. It takes 1 second for the light reflected by the Moon to reach the Earth. It takes approximately 8 minutes and 14 seconds for the Sun's light to travel the 1 Astronomical Unit separating the star from the planet (and you have learned it's more or less 150 millions of kilometers but it doesn't register. Such big numbers cannot be computed by the human brain and that's how it is). It takes the light five hours to reach Pluto. Another four to shine on Eris, the furthest dwarf planet known to Humanity. More to reach the lonely Sedna, which completes its orbit in 12 000 years.