Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 17: Knock, Knock, Knockin' On...

CHAPTER 17: Knock, Knock, Knockin' On...

Elsewhere

The Milky Way galaxy is of such baffling, unthinkable size that most human minds find it difficult, if not impossible, to visualize.

For a human standing on the surface of the planet Earth, it is impossible to be more than roughly 16,000 miles or 25,700 kilometers from the place of their birth. In other words, halfway around the world. A considerable distance for a human, of course, but on a larger scale...

From the surface of Earth to the moon (or Luna) is 238,000 miles or 384,000 kilometers, a journey that took the Apollo 11 astronauts close to 52 hours.

The distance from the Earth to the Sun (or Sol) is commonly called one astronomical unit, or AU, which is equal to 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers, such a distance that even Sol's rays take eight minutes to reach Earth at the speed of light.

Mars, the nearest planet to Earth, is approximately 225 million kilometers away at the closest point of its orbit, or slightly under 2.5 AU.

The nearest star system to Sol, Alpha Centauri, is approximately 1.34 parsecs away, which equals over 206,000 AU.

And there are hundreds of billions of star systems in the Milky Way, across a range of an estimated 31,000 to 55,000 parsecs, large enough for hundreds times hundreds of billions of planets.

Most humans don't like to think about such incredible distances. If they do, they try not to dwell on it. Thinking of one's relative size in comparison to the universe tends to make people feel uncomfortable. The whole of known creation is simply so vast that humans are mere cells in a cosmic body.

If the reader feels frighteningly small when reading this, they may rest assured; such a feeling is entirely normal, an indication of a healthy sense of scale and perspective.

Such is the point of this diversion: to impart that sense of perspective... to give some idea as to just how far from Earth we are about to travel.

Nearly 8000 parsecs from Earth, somewhere within the constellation we call Sagittarius, there is a bright, compact radio source that has never been directly observed by human astronomers, due to being shrouded in clouds of cosmic dust. Current scientific theory posits that this radio source is a supermassive black hole that serves as the rotational center, and possibly the creation point, of the entire Milky Way galaxy. The phenomenon is called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star").

It will likely take millennia of technological development before human eyes can see Sagittarius A* without the aid of telescopes and satellites... that is, if such a thing is even possible. When and if humans ever make the journey there, they may find more than just the theorized black hole, hidden within clouds of cosmic dust large enough to cover a million Earths.

Somewhere in the dark unknown of Sagittarius A*, precariously hovering just above the event horizon of that black hole... there is a palace.

Known to precious few, the palace resembled an enormous, elaborate cathedral in space, the size of a city block. How it stayed in stable orbit without plunging into the black hole's depths, no one could say. Its great towers and spires, seemingly delicate, were constructed of a material far stronger than any diamond... a substance like nothing ever seen on present-day Earth. Venture close enough, and one could see that the palace's strangeness was not limited to just its materials: half of its mass appeared sharp and solid, real, while the rest faded into intangible shadows of itself, in apparent defiance of every natural law.