“They say home is where your heart is, and mine lies among the stars, across the universe.”

The expanding universe, the immensity and eternity of the sky, the exhilarating realization that we are nothing but stardust, floating in the shores of the cosmic ocean.

“I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars make me dream” - these words echo within my soul, immaculately encapsulating the fervent zeal that resonates within me.

When you’ve dreamt about the starry heavens your whole life, the fact that the celestial wonders aligned on the day the heavens created you, feels…ethereal.

Was it a mere coincidence that as I stepped into my eighteenth orbit around the sun, a new year of my earthly existence kicked off with a cosmic symphony of events - the dance of fireballs in the form of the Quartinoid meteor shower, coinciding with the parhelion, when the Sun’s the nearest to the earth that’s rushing away at its fastest!

The highs, the rush you feel when you’re chasing after shooting stars, the streaks of light - the fleeting wishes whispered by the universe’s grand fireworks. It was as if I could feel the weight of the stardust in the depths of my bones.

The warmth of the sun’s rays on your skin, the soft glow of the sunlight amidst the cold winter winds, the cosmic intimacy almost as if you could hear Helios, the Greek Sun god whispering secrets of the universe, a celestial embrace…

Carl Sagan in his “Cosmos”, eloquently described that the universe is not merely a collection of celestial bodies, but a “story written in the language of stars.” He liked to believe that universe is pretty big space; if it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.

The universe is like a realm of contrasts. The raging fire of the sun, the chilling indifference of the void, the galaxies, strewn like sea froth, drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark. And oh - the black holes, the darkness that fascinates everyone.

Staring into the abyss of a black hole, not the sort filled with despair that we forge for ourselves, but the crushing remains of those stars, a million times bigger than our Sun. Black holes are so tragically beautiful, a graveyard of stars, where the forces of gravity are so intensely strong, threatening to swallow you whole.

I wonder what it would be like to be trapped in this world of sheer darkness, where days turn to years, where all that you were is nothing but a bunch a fleeting memories. The stars collapse into themselves (into a super-dense point of singularity) with a deafening rage when they run out of fuel. The walls of confinement (the event horizon) that even light cannot escape, so yes, black holes are kinda invisible.

The space is filled with paradoxes, the vastness stretched to infinity, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the mere size of it all.

“You are floating through space on a giant rock that circles a ball of fire next to a moon that moves the sea and you don’t believe in miracles?”

What Are Black Holes?

Black holes are like black voids in space. A massive dead star that has such a gravitational field that even light cannot escape, any light that’s emitted from the star is pulled back by the forces of gravity. We can’t see such stars as the light rays will never reach us.