I know how this might sound to some of you. “Here we go again, with one of those conspiracy freaks from the depths of the Internet” – and you’d be right to think that. I’ve seen my fair share of nonsense online, but I can promise all of you that I’m telling the truth, or at least I’m telling you all what I think I saw. I don’t know if I was drunk or high or some crazy shit like that, but if there’s even a small chance that what I saw was real, then we are all in grave danger. Let’s get formalities out of the way.
My name is Hank Beauregard, Ph.D. I studied astrophysics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota from 2007 to 2011, and I now work at an observatory in Texas. My job’s not as glamorous as it sounds; mainly my colleagues and I sit around plugging data into automated programs at local observatories and reading over photographs taken overnight. I mean, the pay’s decent, and the subject matter is pretty interesting.
Over the past three or four years, my team and I have been studying a set of dwarf galaxies in close proximity to our own, occasionally discovering new stars or more detailed regions of the night sky. So far, we’ve discovered at least a dozen subsections of the galaxies orbiting the Milky Way – another step in analyzing the observable universe. But enough about my work – if you’re still here, you probably want to hear about what I witnessed.
Around a week ago, I was examining a set of images aimed at a matrix of irregular galaxies not far from our own, when I noticed something was off about them. The entirety of the Carina Dwarf galaxy was gone, and a decent portion of the Magellanic Clouds was missing.
I was bewildered, to say the least. From what I know, there’s no phenomenon that could just block off a whole cluster of stars like that. Even if it was a large planet, each star would have simply appeared a little dimmer than before, and there’s no chance that all of them went nova – the colossal release of energy would have destroyed our planet. And besides, there’s no way so many stars could have detonated at once.
Clearly, something had happened to these galaxies to have blocked them off from view – or, if it was even possible – to have removed them entirely. I hadn’t seen anything like this since I learned about the Boötes Void – a dark, generally empty region of space roughly 700 million light years from Earth. I passed the images off to my colleagues, but they had just as much of an explanation.
A couple days went by, and we received yet more images from the Hubble telescope, and to our surprise – even more of the Magellanic Clouds had gone missing, lost to whatever mysterious force had claimed it. Fellow astrophysicists and I were in a frenzy. No known phenomenon in the entire universe could produce this enigma– let alone spread faster than the speed of light itself. Perplexed and unnerved, we consulted our partners over in Houston, who even then couldn’t give us an explanation.
We watched in horror as the Large Magellanic Cloud was devoured by unknown jaws, as the stars before our very eyes disappeared without a trace. Whatever happened to those stars was spreading, and at far beyond the speed of light. The rules of our world, no, our universe were being rewritten before our very eyes. My colleagues and I started to formulate theories as to what was going on up there. Perhaps the starlight was being obscured by some exotic phenomenon, like dark matter or some strange, unknown form of energy.
Maybe we had just seen signs of an advanced alien civilization whose spacecraft somehow achieved interstellar travel. These creatures could have been feeding on the stars they touched, absorbing their mass and energy into a larger structure, like a Dyson Sphere or a Matrioshka Brain, or perhaps some other megastructure we hadn’t even thought of yet! In any case, what we saw in those pictures was beyond anything we ever knew, or probably will ever know. Some members of the lab got so desperate that now they’re even praying, asking for forgiveness from a god who has clearly abandoned us.
Yesterday, I looked up at the night sky, remembering how, as a child, I’d stare into the heavens and wonder about the endless possibilities space held for humankind. But in the end, I was gravely mistaken. Our first glimpse of the universe’s true potential was not a stellar adventure among the stars. It was not some space opera, where daring crewmembers of an advanced, futuristic ship made landfall on an exotic world. This was real, and it was terrifying.
I’ve already shoehorned in the inexplicability of this phenomenon, but to be honest it’s all I can think about, how we barely scratched the surface of what really lies in the cosmic abyss. For now, all I can do is wait for it to reach the Milky Way and engulf us, or destroy us, or whatever the hell it has planned for our world. Whatever it is, it will be here soon – based on the distance from the Carina galaxy to our own, the events we witnessed happened just over 8,500 years ago – before recorded human civilization even existed. I’m sure laboratories and amateur astronomers around the world are starting to see the slight differences in our view. I’m sure major news outlets will be brimming with anxious news anchors by next week, spreading the story further and causing panic. I’m just here to warn you about what will come next.
Live life as best you can. Embrace your family and friends. Take that trip you were planning all those years back. Ask out that cute boy a couple lockers down. Do it all now, because it won’t be long until this anomaly reaches our world. We can already see stars fading around the outer Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way, and we’ve predicted that at the rate the stellar blackout is spreading, it will be upon our world in approximately 58 years and two months. I have to go for now, but I’ll keep you posted. Stay safe and do what you can to enjoy your lives. And for those stargazers out there, don’t be surprised when you see some changes in the heavens – because the night sky looks different tonight.