I am a space explorer...a space traveller...some call us star finders. It's a lonely life sometimes, exploring distant sights only accessible through the ancient transit points.
Star gates - nobody knows who built them, but they still work. I am one of thousands of star finders that map the transit system. Yes, we star finders may number in the thousands, but the universe is unimaginably vast and so we almost never meet. I haven't see a human in decades, though I've met my fair share of aliens including many species who find me about as interesting as an ant.
Today I took a jump and came across this magnificent quasar, 12 billion light years from Earth. A quasar is a like a hungry beast - it's a black hole that consumes so much matter that death rays of enormous energy shine with the light of a million dying suns from the torus-shaped accretion disk.
Yet life is possible here. In fact, my instruments tell me that the accretion disk of gas and matter - I call it 'the torus' - surrounding quasar contains 140 trillion times all the water in the Earth's oceans. Wouldn't want to get too close, though...
I'll probably spend a few weeks here, exploring the outer regions of the torus in more depth. So beautiful, but there's nobody here with whom I can share that beauty.
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I hope you enjoyed my little space fantasy. It's actually mixed with some facts, including the vastness of the water resources in this quasar system 12 billion light years from Earth. Here's the NASA JPL article I based it on, from which I cut the image that I used
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2011-223
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I can't lay claim to the phrase "star finder"...it's derived from the hot new science-fantasy roleplaying game "Starfinder" by Paizo, which I only just purchased. The game is about space exploration and adventure!
