NYND 3308: Day 39
10 Feb 2022Helios Eusebio
February 10, 330807:11:14 UGT
Explorer's Anchorage, Stuemeae FG-Y d7561 CD 4
MET: 38:12:52:04
There's 400 billion stars in the galaxy and any number of ways to blaze your own trail to them. There's no shortage of options available to Commanders looking to make their own mark on the galactic community. Some choose to trade, some choose to fight, some choose to mine and some choose to explore.
For those who take the exploration option, there's a handful of landmarks that are considered places to visit for any explorer willing to explore the black. Mitterand Hollow, Labirinto, the Crab Pulsar, Jackson's Lighthouse, the Voyager Probes and Colonia are some of the more frequently visited destinations.
But there are some locations that are considered to be a rite of passage for explorers. One of them is Sagittarius A*, the Supermassive Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way.
I've visited Sag A* only once before, back in 3306. Tonight, it was Rhea's turn.
Challenger and Gates of Babylon left Lunar Hyperlight and headed for the Black Hole. At a distance of 585 ly, it was nothing more than a trip down the block, even for Rhea's Anaconda which only had half the jump range of ours. I let her do the navigating as I felt it would give her good practice. Other than a weird glitch where her planned route kept resetting, she did well.
As mentioned before, one of the best ways to detect the presence of a Black Hole is to look for gravitational lensing, a distortion of the light near the Event Horizon due to the strong tidal forces. Most Black Holes are stellar-mass and thus about the size of a large city at most, which means you don't see the distortion effect until you are near the Black Hole. Sag A* on the other hand? You can see that distortion even when you're light years away. Granted, it doesn't look as ominous as you might expect, instead appearing as sort of a diffuse glow against the sky, but there's no mistaking that glow for what it is.
And then you arrive at the Event Horizon.
To come face to face with a Supermassive Black Hole is to confront something that is almost beyond comprehension. Sag A* is a behemoth weighing 4 million times the mass of Sol and with a radius of 11 million kilometers. Space is so distorted and warped around the Event Horizon that Rhea and I found it difficult to rendezvous, every time we thought we were going to drop on each other we instead ended up hundreds of kilometers apart. The light of 400 billion stars is redshifted almost completely out of existence, bathing the entire sky in a dark crimson shade.
This is the anchor for the entire galaxy. An object so massive that we still have no idea how it actually formed. But Sag A* was here long before the rest of the Milky Way was and it'll be here long after the universe has grown so old that even the very protons will have decayed. The legacy of the Milky Way will be the abyss at its heart.
I understand why the team that operated the Event Horizon Telescope chose to give the Supermassive Black Hole in M87 the informal name of " Pōwehi", taken from the Hawaiian creation chant. A Supermassive Black Hole is perhaps the closest thing to a God that exists in the Cosmos.
But Sag A* was only our first stop tonight. Next was a quick jump to Explorer's Anchorage, a starport constructed just 3 ly from Sag A* as part of the Distant Worlds 2 expedition back in 3305. I was part of the initiative to mine the raw materials used in the construction, so it's nice to have contributed a small share to the galactic community in that regard. The primary mission of the station is research on Sag A*, which is still clearly visible at this distance.
After turning in our exobiology data, Rhea hopped on board Challenger. We first paid a visit to a nearby proto-Lagrange cloud which contained L04 type anomalies. We saw similar anomalies at Magellan's Star last year and it's interesting to find them in the galactic core as well. Our working theory is that these anomalies are extra-galactic, so maybe the ones here formed when Sag A* did? There's also the fact that they may be the source of Equestrian magic, which is why I was particularly eager to show Vinyl (but not so eager to allow her to do a spacewalk to get a closer look).
One of the things I like to do on these expeditions is go above or below the galactic disc. We so often limit ourselves to this plane of the galaxy that we never get a chance to view things from outside of it. And I felt that being at the core was the best chance to show Rhea just how much was waiting for us out there. So, we kicked the FSD into gear and pointed Challenger in just one direction and one direction only: up.
Just over 1,500 ly later, we found a good parking spot on a moon of a ringed Class III Gas Giant. Behind us was a black abyss with a handful of stars, filling up the emptiness on the edge of the void. In front of us: the galaxy.
The gravity on the moon was .07 G, which meant even the thrusters on the Artemis suit gave us insane height with our boost jumps. We were even able to scale a small mountain near our landing site, on foot! It was a mountain that Mir 1 and 2 easily could've navigated but honestly? There was just something...fun about scaling it ourselves. A task that would've taken hours on Earth and been grueling and painstaking, we managed to pull off in a matter of minutes.
If there's one thing I would recommend explorers do, it's to see the galaxy from an outside perspective. Whether it's going above the plane or going all the way out to the edge of the disc at Beagle Point or Magellan's Star. To see not only how much is out there for us to explore, but also just how fragile we are in the grand scale of the universe. Seeing the sky going from being filled with light to pitch black in a matter of minutes can be a haunting experience. But it's made all the more worthwhile to look back over your shoulder and see the brilliance of the Milky Way shining in the darkness.
We're spending the rest of the flight day at Explorer's Anchorage. This will be the only chance for us to explore the systems near Sag A* and so this station is as good a place to be as any. Not to mention that it'll be nice to sleep in both an actual bed and an environment that's approaching 1 G.
And of course we can't forget the bar. Sounds like the rest of the crew is already there, so I'd best go join them. It's not every day you get to make a toast to a Black Hole and then drink with the stars.