These are the shows of yesteryear, the pristine remnants of the origin of the solar system waiting frozen in the interstellar dark. Out here trillions of orbiting show banks and icebergs are stored, gently suspended about the sun. They cruise no faster than a small propeller-driven aircraft would, buzzing through the blue skies of the far off earth. The slowness of their motion just balances the gravity of the distant sun, and, poised between feeble contending forces they take millions of years to complete one orbit around that yellow point of light. Out here you are the third of a way to the nearest star. Or rather to the next nearest star: In the depth and utter blackness of the dark sky around you is entirely clear that the sun is one of the stars. It is not even the brightest star in the sky. Sirius is brighter and Canopus. If there are planets circling the star called the sun there is no hint of them from this remote vantage point . These trillions of floating icebergs fill an immense volume of space the ne
arest one is three billion kilometers away from us, about the distance of the earth from Uranus. There are many icebergs but the space they fill a shell surrounding the sun is incomprehensibly vast quarantined from whatever mischief may be going on down there in that alien and hostile region bordering the beyond,
the occasional soft ping of a cosmic ray from gome collapsed star at the other end of the Milky way, hardly anything ever happens here. It is very peaceful. But something has happened a gravitational intrusion, not by the sun or its possible planets but by another star. It was slow in coming, and at its closest it was never very near. You can see it over there, glowing faintly red much dimmer than the sun. This cloud of icebergs has been carried with the sun on its motions through the Milky Way galaxy but other stars have their own characteristics motions and sometimes by accident approach us. So on occasion as now there is a little gravitational rumbling and the cloud trembles. Since your iceberg is bound so weakly to the sun, even a l
Some common words found in the essay are: Comets Discover, nearest star,
Approximate Word count = 710
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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