When Zhao Changxing and others returned to the Yuanhang spacecraft, the space carrier that sent people here was of no use. Its fate will be the same as that of the spacecraft that were disposed of before, and it will stay forever in another way.
In the solar system.
At this moment, it already has an extremely high speed, which gives it extremely high kinetic energy. After a slight orbit correction, it will hit Vesta at a smaller angle, transferring all its energy to
This dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt changes its forward trajectory.
This is the last spaceship left to be disposed of.
Under people's gaze, it gradually moved away from the Yuanhang spacecraft, flew into the vast space, and disappeared.
At this moment, the speed of the Yuanhang spacecraft has increased to about 800 kilometers per second, and is still rising.
As emergent faults are dealt with one by one, and various emergencies and unexpected situations are continuously resolved, the antimatter annihilation reactor and ion thruster can finally reach the design efficiency.
With every second that passes, its speed increases by meters.
At this moment, a total of about 400,000 people on the entire Voyage spacecraft were awake. The remaining people, whether they were deep space people or Moyun Litar people, were in hibernation.
Life is still going on, just like people are still living in the space city in low-Earth orbit of the Sedna star.
After leaving Sedna and entering the fourth year of its voyage, when the speed of the Yuanhang spacecraft increased to about 2,500 kilometers per second, through the telescope, Zhao Changxing finally saw that the previously deployed methods were working.
The spaceships left behind by humans, with a total mass of tens of billions of tons, hit the intended asteroid at the highest speed that their engines could support, changing its orbit and changing it from its original state of being harmless to humans and animals.
, transformed into a world-destroying killer capable of changing the orbit of a dwarf planet like Vesta.
It begins to rush towards the inner solar system. And, under the acceleration of the sun's gravity, its speed will become faster and faster.
In the 17th year of the voyage, when the speed of the Yuanhang spacecraft increased to about 10,000 kilometers per second and the distance from the sun was as high as two trillion kilometers, the ultra-high-precision optical telescope array observed that the asteroid hit Vesta accurately.
.
But whether its impact caused the expected orbital change of Vesta is uncertain. Because it is too small, people can observe the impact, but at this moment it is not even possible to see its true appearance.
But it doesn’t matter. If its orbit really changes as expected, then in about five years, people will observe another impact near the sun in the accretion disk of the black hole.
trace.
By then, by observing the gravitational disturbance of the black hole on the sun, we will be able to confirm whether it has produced the changes that people expected.
Now, keep sailing, keep accelerating.
The distance at this moment is about 70 times farther than the original distance between Sedna and the sun. But even at such a far distance, the brightness of the sun is as high as -8.9 magnitude.
——Originally, it should only be of magnitude -7.6, but compared to the past, the sun has become brighter due to the influence of black holes, so it has reached its current brightness.
For comparison, the brightness of Venus when viewed from the Earth is only magnitude -4.7, only a few tenths of the brightness of the Sun at this moment.
This brightness is even enough to cast shadows visible to the naked eye on objects.
This is the sun. Such a powerful sun.
This is a vast space more than one trillion kilometers away from the sun. This is a place that humans have never reached before. There is almost nothing here except interstellar dust. This place probably belongs to the category of the Inner Oort Cloud, but
During these years of voyages, people have not observed any macroscopic stars.
Not a single one. Not even one as small as a pebble or a stone.
In front of human beings, the universe uses this extreme emptiness and vastness to brazenly demonstrate its power.
But it's not really empty here. Even here, there are one to ten molecules per cubic meter on average, as well as certain atoms and subatomic particles.
By comparison, there were approximately 400 billion molecules per cubic meter on the moon's surface.
The difference is huge and can be seen clearly.
But now, even such a thin material density has caused considerable problems for the Yuanhang spacecraft.
The extremely high speed of the Yuanhang spacecraft causes the collision of these interstellar particles to have a very high energy. When they hit the outer shell of the Yuanhang spacecraft, they will stimulate a variety of secondary radiation, seriously affecting the interior of the spacecraft.
facilities and equipment.
This is radiation that even the most advanced materials that humans can create can only rely on sufficient thickness to resist. At this moment, the speed of the Yuanhang spacecraft has only reached % of the speed of light.
In this almost empty space, the Yuanhang spacecraft was advancing rapidly.
Over the years, the Yuanhang spacecraft has passed through some small interstellar molecular clouds or atomic clouds, and each time it passed through, the sober spacecraft operation and maintenance personnel felt like they were facing a formidable enemy.
Compared with ordinary interstellar space, the average material density of interstellar molecular clouds may be tens of thousands of times higher than that of ordinary interstellar space. Correspondingly, the intensity of particle impacts will also increase tens of thousands of times. This forces people to deal with it carefully.
People at this moment are just like people in the feudal era who explored the oceans above the earth and faced storms, rocks and other things. They try to avoid what they can, and only when they can't avoid it, they force their way through.
From this point of view, it is very unwise to use space vehicles that can reach extremely high speeds to start a war close to stars. The reason is very simple. The density of matter near stars is too high. If the spacecraft does not
If the protection is high enough, the spacecraft may be damaged by radiation before the war begins.
At the same time, if these interstellar materials are viewed from the perspective of war, they also have considerable strategic significance.
The defender can use these interstellar materials to arrange his own defense plan to prevent the enemy from quickly breaking through. If the attacker also has enough information, he can even find a safe navigation route and launch a surprise attack.
The information obtained during this voyage allowed Zhao Changxing to start thinking more deeply about everything about interstellar wars from a more fundamental and overall perspective.
Anyway, most people are in hibernation at the moment, and there are not so many things for him to deal with. So he spends all his free time on studying and thinking.
This is a journey to comprehensively improve yourself and make yourself more adaptable to the development of civilization.
Time was still passing slowly. After another five years, the telescope, which had been paying attention to the direction of the sun, finally reported good news to Zhao Changxing.
People have observed abnormal movements of the black hole. This abnormal movement can only be caused by the impact of Vesta.
This means that the layout people left in the solar system before they left really had an effect.
From now on, the black hole will be closer to the sun. It will swallow solar matter faster and the radiation it will release will be more violent. The environment in the solar system will be even worse.
"Let the Moyunli Tal civilization deal with this mess."
The voyage is still continuing. After the acceleration phase finally ended, and the Yuanhang spacecraft's speed had reached the predetermined speed of 24,000 kilometers per second, the distance between it and the sun expanded to about 14.5 trillion kilometers. Or...
...about 1.5 light years.
At this moment, even though the brightness of the sun has increased again compared to the past, from this distance, its brightness is still reduced to - .
This brightness is probably slightly dimmer than when Mars was seen from the Earth. But it is still a real bright star.
It is still the brightest star in the entire sky.
After sailing again for more than 6 years, the distance between the Yuanhang spacecraft and the sun expanded to 2 light years.
This is a landmark distance. Because it means that from then on, the Yuanxian spacecraft truly left the solar system and escaped the gravitational control of the sun.
This is the edge of the Solar System's Oort Cloud.
After this distance, the gravitational pull of the other stars will be greater than the gravitational pull of the sun. The gravitational pull of the sun can no longer control the movement of any matter.
It's time to truly say goodbye.
But there was no ceremony at the moment. People were still busy, maintaining the normal operation of the Yuanhang spacecraft. Zhao Changxing just came to the porthole of the spacecraft, looked at the brightest star in the universe through the special glass, and waved
Just waved my hand.
In the future, Zhao Changxing will still maintain the same life trajectory as before. If there is a major emergency in the spacecraft, deal with it - these years have not been smooth sailing. In fact, on average there will be a major incident every 1.2 years
The crisis may even endanger the entire spacecraft if not handled properly. But fortunately, it was successfully handled every time.
In the most dangerous time, Zhao Changxing even had to urgently wake up more than 3,000 engineers, scientists and technicians to successfully deal with it.
In the rest of his free time, Zhao Changxing was constantly studying and thinking.
So far, he has even passed the doctoral final exams in more than twenty majors anonymously.
But it's still not enough. Far from it.
Time was still passing slowly. When the distance from the sun expanded to about 6.6 light-years, Zhao Changxing, who was still studying, was awakened by a harsh alarm bell.
He glanced at the center console, but didn't find anything wrong with the spacecraft.
Xiao Xi's voice came over at this time.
"Captain, five seconds ago, a violent explosion was suspected to have occurred about 16,000 kilometers away from our spacecraft. Moreover, the source of the explosion seemed to maintain the same speed and course as us. Because I did not observe anything opposite to it.