A myriad of blazing stars release their beautiful twinkling light within more than 100 billion systems floating in the observable universe. The detectable, or apparent, universe is where we can see from our universe, either with our independent eyes or with some exceptionally refined telescope. We cannot see what may (or may not) exist beyond the edge (the horizon) of our known or apparent universe. This is because the brightness of anything that might exist beyond the cosmic horizon has not had enough of a chance to contact us since our universe was brought into the world in the giant explosion almost a long time ago.
Our huge, impressive zig-zag world, Smooth Road, is like an absolutely overwhelming number of different systems scattered throughout the universe. The stars and their constituent gases live mainly on a plate, orbiting a focal mass where the stars are in close proximity to each other, and where there is also a massive dark opening. Supermassive dark vents weigh millions to billions of times more than the Sun. The massive dark vent that has been accepted at the focus of our Smooth Path is relatively light. It measures “as is” the millions, rather than the billions, of the oriented masses of the sun. The Sun and its magical entourage of natural planets, moons and a host of more modest elements lie some 25,000 light years from the cosmic focus where the dark opening lies. Light travels about 9.46 trillion kilometers or 5.88 trillion miles in an Earth year.
From where we stand, in the farthest reaches of our cosmic system, in one of its curved arms, the various stars have all the attributes to join in a band across the sky – that band is the smooth road. Due to the light pollution of our planet, a large part of its inhabitants have never had the opportunity to see the constellation of stars that make up our system in the night sky. For those of us who have seen this incredible company, it is an incredible sight, a sight that honestly makes any viewer on Earth realize that we are just a small, flawless part of that huge, massive, powerful thing. The stars we find in this range orbit the cosmic focus, taking over north of 100 million Earth years to complete a solitary circle. The world of Andromeda is the closest mega-neighbor to our system in space. It is a world as twisted as our smooth road, but it is a greater zigzag and has an extremely large dark hole at its heart.
The world of Andromeda is 2 million light years away, so far. Like our universe, it contains stars of any age and a rich supply of gas. In about 5 billion years, our world will impact and converge with Andromeda.
Our massive, smooth road system and our largest coil, Andromeda, along with no fewer than 20 more modest worlds, comprise what is known as the Close Encounter. The neighboring group is two to three million light years across. Despite this, this is minuscule compared to the clusters of the entire cosmic system. There are huge groups of systems in our universe, some of which contain many component worlds.
The smooth path is a huge circle 100,000 light years across. It contains a hundred million stars. The oldest star formed in a Smooth Way long ago, long before our hot Sun appeared in the world about 4.56 years ago. The early phase drink that the universe made during its infancy was a similar straight soup from hands to the lightest particles. There was no carbon, oxygen or iron. In the early youth of our cosmic system, science was exceptionally basic. Before more conflicting artificial mixtures arise, and before a group of nearby planets, say ours, can arise, old stars need to change the components of matter, recombine it and use it again.