Chapter 172 - 171: This is the Cosmos

The brightness of the Sun as Li Qingsong saw it was still roughly four times that of Venus at its brightest as seen from Earth.

It was still so bright, so dazzling.

After looking at the Sun, Li Qingsong turned back to face the journey ahead.

With the Oort Cloud marking the gravitational boundary of the Solar System at about one light-year from the Sun, Li Qingsong had traveled for a very long time, yet he had only crossed a mere one-fifth of the Solar System’s expanse.

The sheer vastness and immensity of the Cosmos could easily make one despair.

But looking at the numerous ships under his command and feeling the consciousness link with his hundreds of millions of Clones, Li Qingsong felt no despair, only determination.

He knew that as long as he pressed on, he would eventually reach his goal.

After traveling for some time more, Li Qingsong finally made a new kind of discovery.

The numerous unmanned probes and survey satellites scattered around the fleet had finally found the first macroscopic celestial body.

It was a rather large celestial body. It measured 78 kilometers at its longest point and 22 kilometers at its widest.

It was grayish-black in color and hung silently, suspended in space.

This was, without a doubt, a previously undiscovered body. It was also very likely the target he had been searching for.

A true Oort Cloud object.

Suppressing his excitement, Li Qingsong decisively dispatched a large Scientific Research Vessel from the fleet. It performed an all-out deceleration until its velocity relative to the object was zero, then began accelerating in reverse to pursue it.

Several years passed before the vessel finally landed on it. By then, the main fleet had already traveled another 2.5 trillion kilometers.

Due to the immense distance and the resulting communication lag, Li Qingsong had virtually no way of exerting direct control.

But that was fine; an intelligent AI could complete the series of scientific research procedures in his stead.

Thus, after leaving numerous sensor devices behind, the Scientific Research Vessel, carrying about 200 tons of specially extracted samples, began accelerating again to catch up with the main fleet.

By the time the Scientific Research Vessel rejoined the main fleet, the fleet had already traveled several trillion more kilometers, truly arriving at the gravitational boundary of the Solar System.

Throughout this journey of several trillion kilometers, despite continuously scanning a vast area, Li Qingsong had failed to find any other macroscopic celestial bodies.

It wasn’t until he was truly approaching the Solar System’s gravitational boundary that Li Qingsong finally managed to find another.

Compared to the previous one, this object was much smaller, with its longest dimension measuring only 200 meters.

Without hesitation, Li Qingsong dispatched another Scientific Research Vessel.

However, the entire process—the Scientific Research Vessel decelerating, accelerating, decelerating for landing, accelerating to catch the main fleet, and finally decelerating to rejoin it—would take several more years.

Observing through a long-range telescope, Li Qingsong saw that this smaller body looked similar to the larger one discovered earlier, with a similar structure.

This meant that the samples from the larger asteroid would also be highly relevant for studying this smaller one.

The Clones aboard the main fleet carefully collected the 200 tons of hard-won samples. They placed them in various laboratories and, combining them with data from the initial on-site survey, immediately began observation and research.

Li Qingsong observed that the material composing this body was rather porous. It wasn’t made of dense rock like a typical terrestrial planet; instead, it resembled a sponge, sparse and full of holes.

Its density was a mere 0.5 grams per cubic centimeter—only half that of water.

It was primarily composed of substances like water ice, dust, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, but these components were not tightly bound.

Looking at these samples, and then at the distant, 200-meter asteroid floating alone in the vastness of space—with no other macroscopic object for billions of kilometers around—Li Qingsong was filled with emotion.

It was highly likely that this asteroid had migrated here during the early formation of the Solar System and had remained here, undisturbed, for billions of years.

The distance from the Sun here was about one light-year, or approximately 9.4 trillion kilometers.

This was the true border of the Solar System, in every sense of the word. Beyond this point, it was unlikely to find any celestial bodies still held by the Sun’s Gravity, orbiting it.

Yes, even at this immense distance, the asteroid still orbited the Sun.

From here, the Sun’s brightness had diminished to an apparent magnitude of about -2.74.

Though much dimmer than before, this was still comparable to Jupiter at its brightest as seen from Earth.

Across the entire celestial sphere, the Sun was still the brightest star.

However... it was no longer fundamentally different from the other stars.

It was bright, but not overwhelmingly so. It had blended in with the countless other stars, losing its special status.

And yet, its Gravity still controlled every celestial body here. Everything had to orbit it.

Just like this asteroid.

Its orbital velocity relative to the Sun was only about 300 meters per second. At this speed, it would take a full 350 million years to complete a single orbit around the Sun.

Since its birth, it had only circled that star a dozen or so times.

The vastness and splendor of the Solar System, the boundless expanse of the Cosmos, rushed in to envelop Li Qingsong’s very soul.

Looking at the asteroid, Li Qingsong sighed inwardly. ’This is the Solar System... this is the Cosmos...’

In the years that had passed, countless stars had exploded, vanishing from the Cosmos in brilliant bursts of fireworks. At the same time, countless new stars were born from interstellar dust, igniting core fusion and using powerful radiation to blow away their surrounding accretion disks, casting their light out into space.

None of these external changes seemed to affect the asteroid. It just remained here quietly, silently preserving samples from the dawn of the Solar System. It was neither affected by the outside world nor did it affect the outside world, like a high-performance "refrigerator" that had traversed billions of years to bring samples from the Solar System’s infancy into the present.

Now, these samples from the birth of the Solar System were in Li Qingsong’s hands, undergoing the most rigorous examinations with the most advanced equipment available.

The mysteries of the Solar System’s early formation were laid bare before Li Qingsong. The collapse of the early solar nebula, gravitational perturbations, the changes within the Star System when the Sun first "ignited," the influence of Jupiter’s Gravity, the formation mechanism of Earth—answers to these and many other questions began to emerge.