The long voyage continues. This acceleration of only 1 centimeter per square second lasted for more than 90 days until the fleet's speed increased to 80 kilometers per second. We can't accelerate any further. Accelerating further will consume more fuel, and decelerating in the future will also consume more fuel. By then, we may need to use emergency reserve fuel. The acceleration that had lasted for more than three months came to a halt, and the entire fleet completely lost gravity. Because of this acceleration of meters per square second, the cabin of each spacecraft has remained extremely stable during this period of time, which is approximately equivalent to one thousandth of the gravity on Earth. At this moment, we stop accelerating and enter the state of inertial navigation, so even this little gravity disappears. Everything was no longer placed stably in its original position, and all unfixed objects were suspended in the air. Including clones. Among these 15 million clones, except for the 500,000 clones needed to guard the fleet and maintain daily navigation, the remaining million clones lie idly on densely packed beds to rest all day long. With only one hour a day, Li Qingsong would control them to move around to prevent the degeneration of their muscles and body functions.
Originally they could still lie down, but now without gravity, they can only float. Not only them, the entire fleet is also suspended at this moment, suspended in this endless sea of stars. No matter which clone's perspective Li Qingsong switched to, no matter which porthole Li Qingsong looked out from, he saw almost exactly the same starry sky. In the past hour, day, or even month, the external environment has hardly changed. Sometimes he even couldn't help but doubt emotionally whether he was moving at a high speed of 80 kilometers per second or was really standing still. Of course, every time, his reason told him that he was indeed moving forward at an unprecedented speed. It’s just that the starry sky is too vast and there is no reference object, so no matter how fast you fly, it seems like you are standing still. The fleet sailed like this as if it was stationary. The fleet had limited supplies and could not conduct any scientific experiments or research. But this did not prevent Li Qingsong from manipulating the clones' brains to think. I'm just sitting around doing nothing anyway. Therefore, many problems that had accumulated during the long research phase finally had the opportunity to be solved during this voyage. More than ten million brains are thinking about these problems at the same time, looking for inspiration to solve the problem. They sleep when they are sleepy, eat when they are hungry, and continue thinking when they wake up, repeating this process. At the same time, Li Qingsong took advantage of the free time and the opportunity that the fleet's speed and course had stabilized to take out all the space optical telescopes, radio telescopes, etc., and threw them directly into the starry sky, allowing them to start a new round of sky observations. Li Qingsong doesn't even need to fix these space observation equipment. Place them about 1,000 kilometers away from the fleet, adjust their initial state to be stationary, and there is no need to worry about them later. They will always stay there and always maintain a fixed distance from the fleet. Of course, it looked like they were stationary, but in fact, these devices and fleets were all moving towards the inner solar system at a speed of 80 kilometers per second. It was just that the speed and course were exactly the same, so it looked like they were all stationary. Dozens of space optical telescopes and dozens of space radio telescopes were each aimed at a piece of the sky and began observations day and night. As a result, a large number of strange astronomical events that Li Qingsong had never seen before came into his sight. Black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, nebulae and star clusters, extragalactic galaxies, quasars…
And so on and so forth. Li Qingsong knew that when science and technology developed to a certain level, if they wanted to continue to improve, it would be inseparable from astronomical observation. There are too many fundamental physics theories that need to be proven by astronomical events. It's just that over the past few hundred years, I have been busy with lower-level development and have never paid too much attention to space. In the past few years, I have made up for it. So, time slowly passed by in the long process of observation and thinking, review of the theoretical knowledge that had been mastered, and speculation and conjecture about the knowledge that had not been mastered. In front of us, the brightness of the sun has increased from just being able to cast a dim shadow on Luoshen to now being as bright as the moon seen from Earth. Of course, it's just brightness, not size. In fact, the sun that Li Qingsong saw at this moment was still just a small dot of light, without any disk-like structure at all. This seemed to be the only change that could be seen with the naked eye during the voyage of several years. Everything else remained unchanged. At least not noticeable to the naked eye. "We'll be crossing the orbit of Pluto in another month. We're finally almost there." One day during the long voyage, Li Qingsong was filled with emotion, feeling the vastness of the universe and the length of the journey. The journey from the edge of the solar system to the inner solar system is already so long. The distance between the sun and the nearest star is about light years. This number is about 2,500 times the number of the voyage he is currently on. It was only a 1/2500 voyage, but I had already tried my best. The vastness of the universe cannot be measured by one thousand or ten thousand light years. “I don’t know when I can truly travel in this vast universe.” Li Qingsong yearned and sighed. Hundreds of telescopes are still suspended around the fleet, exploring outer space without stopping. During this exploration, Li Qingsong suddenly discovered a slightly strange celestial body. Judging from its shape, it should be a nebula. A nebula is a cloud of matter formed by the gathering together of interstellar dust, hydrogen, helium, and other plasmas. Nebulae are ubiquitous in interstellar space, and there are many of them, some large and some small. Large nebulae can give birth to thousands or tens of thousands of stars, while small nebulae are obscure and almost invisible to people. Nebulae can be roughly classified into bright nebulae and dark nebulae according to whether they emit light or not. At this moment, what Li Qingsong saw was a bright nebula. In visible light, the nebula glows dimly.
But Li Qingsong remembered clearly that the last time his space telescope observed this direction, he saw nothing. But a nebula cannot travel such a long distance in a short time. It is unlikely that it flew from somewhere else in just a few years. Then there is only one possibility left. There must be some reason that caused it to change from a dark nebula to the bright nebula it is today. What could be the reason? “This small nebula is only five or six light years away from the solar system, very close. This direction...is the direction where the Gliese 625 galaxy is located." The Gliese 625 galaxy is also called the Bluetoke galaxy by the Bluetoke people.
