Book 5: Chapter 65: The Black Hole
Icarus
June 2345
Sagittarius A*
Twenty-three million kilometers. That was the diameter of the event horizon. Of course, that wasn’t tremendously big on the grand scale of things. The red supergiant UY Scuti was reputed to have a diameter of more than a billion kilometers, and that was just a garden-variety star. From our distance, we had to use our SURGE-based telescopic image enhancement just to see Sagittarius A* as more than a point source.
We’d approached from forty-five degrees to galactic north, per the instructions on the star maps. The black hole had an accretion disk in the galactic plane that extended several light-years, and you wouldn’t want to fly through that. Even from above, the magnetic fields threw off enough crud to make this area of space interesting, in a bad way.
But the black hole itself was … incredible. Of course, we took pictures and videos aplenty. And spent unmeasured time just staring at the thing. This was the fabric of the universe in its raw form.
Bobs, and post-life physicists and astronomers as well, would have our guts for dinner if we failed to take every possible measurement. We made sure we covered all the bases.
Finally, though, it was time to leave. Dae had started his good clone/bad clone routine again, and I could feel his eyes boring into the side of my head.
“Fine, Dae. Let’s pack ‘er up and go. But if we forgot something, that’s on you.”