My prompt for this entry was to write about something that I know nothing about (but would maybe like to know). I’ve chosen to write a story about astronomy, a subject that has always interested me but that I really don’t have a lot of knowledge on. I’ve taken the perspective of an astronaut in this story.

Day 112. I’m not sure exactly where we are on the schedule, I think a little behind, but we’ve been moving at a good pace for a few weeks now. We have yet to find any indication that our research is supported. I’ve just woken up to the smell of fresh oxygen and aluminum.  I am not sure how long I slept. The funny thing about time when you’re in space is that its nothing like ‘time’ at home, on Earth. Depending on where you are, it can be faster, slower, or seemingly unmoving. Time is a manmade concept, and I’ve detached from that concept quite a bit over the last few months.

After making sure everything is order on board, I relocated to the meal room. Going through an assortment of pre-packaged, vacuum sealed foods to choose from, I began to miss home again. It comes and goes, happening randomly, this deep ache I have to be back with my family again. I questioned again, my reasoning for agreeing to this excursion. I sighed.

Moments later, I heard a faint ticking coming from the dashboard of our screens on board. I looked up. Could it be…? The ticking continued. I stood up, walked over to the screen.

“Mark, come take a look at this, would ya?” I called into the next room.
Mark walked in and began to hear it himself. His eyes widened. He quickened his pace over to the screen and glanced down.

Both of us could not really believe what we saw. Light years away, our radar detected a force so powerful that the equipment we had could not measure it, and began to go haywire. Dials going up and down, our electromagnetic radar became inconsistent and bouncy. It had to be.

“There she is” I couldn’t believe my own words out of my mouth.
Mark said nothing.
We turned on the infrared monitor and zoomed in on the source of the extreme energy. Very faintly, we could see it. A small dot in the cosmos, emitting absolutely zero light, and a force that could not be measured.
“I don’t believe it,” Mark said softly.

I ignored him and continued shifting around the detection equipment and the infrared camera so that we could take a picture of what we were experiencing. After saving a few screens of the detection to our hard drive, I programmed the radar to zoom in even further. I had to be sure.

But yes, there it was. It couldn’t be anything else. There is no other explanation for an area in space to produce such energy an emit no light alongside it. It had to be, a black hole. This is what we had been searching months for, after observing abnormalities in our astronomical scans from Earth, this is what I had been sent to find.

And we actually found it.

I picked up the radio.
“Houston…we’ve located the source.”