#unknown space

[jiinmalos]

e t e r n i t y

[every-bad-thing]

You Run Out of Sky

(modified from "Stars glitter in the night sky above Earth's atmospheric glow" by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.) On a clear, cold night you notice: the sky is missing some stars. There are still thousands and thousands and thousands, of course. But some seem strangely absent. Like Orion's Belt: everything else is there, but the center belt piece isn't. Or the Big Dipper: there were only three stars in the handle. And the North Star was nowhere to be found. There must be some light obscuring them, you think, maybe reflected off the moon. But a few nights pass, and though the moon gets slimmer, the stars never return. Maybe it's your angle. That must be it. So, just to be sure, you walk around for a while. You still can't see them. In fact, you notice even more stars missing: Orion doesn't even have a belt anymore, and the Big Dipper lost another star in its handle. You start taking pictures of the night sky regularly. Looking through them all a few weeks later confirms what you suspected. It's tough to see, but every night there are fewer stars. One may be there one night, but the next it's just an empty black space. From what you can tell, about four or five stars disappear per night. Which of course leaves all the rest that still fill the sky, but that doesn't mean you're not concerned.

You do what most people do today and search the Internet to see if anyone else has seen this. You find an academic paper--a whole series of academic papers, really--written by scientists talking about this very thing. This is how you find out this has apparently been going on for the past two years. There have already been several conferences on the matter, and the EU formed a task force to investigate it last February. How did you never find out about this? Well, you reason, you never searched for whether the stars are disappearing from the night sky before either. You just kind of assumed, like everyone else besides these scientists apparently, they weren't.

With some effort you read the papers and find out that the scientists have no idea why this is happening either. Maybe some chain reaction caused by a dying star? Maybe rogue black holes? Maybe anti-matter? Maybe some devastating alien war? Maybe a massive star-eating space creature? There's a lot of theories. No facts. And absolutely no clue on what to do about it, or even if there is anything that can be done about it or should be done about it. No one really knows anything.

( "Stars in the Night Sky" by thecrazyfilmgirl is licensed under CC BY 2.0. ) A few more months pass and more stars are gone from the sky. You keep taking pictures. Now it seems stars are disappearing about ten or fifteen at a time. Whole constellations are wiped out. The night sky is now pocked with empty voids like holes in a sheet. One day you watch a bunch of scientists on the news saying they still don't know why the stars are vanishing. The reporter looks surprised and says wait a minute, the stars are vanishing? And the scientists look back and ask how did you not know about this? We've been working on this problem for almost three years! There's over 120 peer reviewed articles on the subject, there's another conference planned in Geneva next March, we're forming a consortium with astronomers in China and the US, like, how is this all news? The reporter shrugs.

A year passes. The sky is a lot more empty than it was before and it's getting emptier. At this point there are maybe half as many as there used to be. Hundreds are going missing every single night. They seem to go in clumps now, whole sections of the sky emptied out at once. You've been following this on the news pretty intensely. But every time you mention it to someone else--at a party or at work or chatting with someone on line at the grocery store--they're always so surprised. The stars? They're really disappearing? Sometimes it happens at night and you can actually point it out to them. Whenever you do, their eyes always go wide and they always say they never really noticed before. They usually ask, do the scientists know what's going on? You tell them that the consortium, which now includes scientists from all over the world, has managed to rule out a lot of theories (like, it can't be black holes because we don't see light bending near the sites of the disappearances) but don't really have solid answers. Maybe at the next conference in Sao Paolo.

Another year passes and the sky is almost completely empty, just a small sprinkling of stars left remaining. And then, one night, there were none at all. This is the point where, suddenly, everyone is starts freaking out, and asking what does this mean, and what do they do, and why did no one tell them, why are they just finding out about this now. Some people, including yourself, say they've known about this for years and there's been all sorts of things written about it, but they are seen as annoying and not listened to at all. Because why would they? The stars are gone and all those scientists that everyone said was so smart couldn't do nothin' about it neither, people tend to say in different ways. Where'd all those smarts getcha? Huh? Because those stars are gone!

They lash out because they're scared and confused, not because they're really mean people (with exceptions, of course). Still, they do have a point. What now? There's no more stars except our own, apparently the last star in existence. Everything else is a dark and empty void. Telescopes pick up nothing. Radio scans pick up nothing. Heat maps show just a uniform cold darkness. Why were we last? Was it something to do with our star, our solar system, us? Or was it completely random? The scientists had no answers. But they knew, soon, they'd have at least one. Because now that ours is the only star left, it's only a matter of time before whatever got all the others comes for ours too. And as much as people everywhere develop a sick feeling of cosmic dread, they're at least looking forward to finally finding out what it is.

Until then, however, all anyone can do is wait. It will come eventually. Whatever it is. Every Terrible Thing That Could Possibly Ever Happen will return. Eventually.

[brightmoontrigon]

ribbons and ice

[wayti-blog]

Great Pyramid of Giza could hide secret chambers with lost pharaoh's tomb inside

TWO hidden voids inside the Great Pyramid of Giza could finally be identified thanks to an ultra-powerful scan. Archaeologists are aware of the voids thanks to a previous scan but they’re pla…

“Archaeologists are aware of the voids thanks to a previous scan but they're planning to use more intense tech to get a better look.“

A team of researchers revealed in their study: "We plan to field a telescope system that has upwards of 100 times the sensitivity of the equipment that has recently been used at the Great Pyramid."

They added: "Since the detectors that are proposed are very large, they cannot be placed inside the pyramid, therefore our approach is to put them outside and move them along the base.“

[vestianguard]

> unknown space, prophecy dungeon.

[vestianguard]

> unknown space, prophecy dungeon.

[vestianguard]

> unknown space, prophecy dungeon.

[vestianguard]

> unknown space, prophecy dungeon.