Venus was always the mother of my love.  The sweet, cradling serenity she blessed me with was enough to keep us steady amongst the storms.  It was opportune for a diligent road forward.

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Three years it would pulsate through my mind, finding a trove within me that might shake the nerves.  They were delicate in their arrival, timid amidst searching, in such a way that it could hollow out the forests that built our great spaceships.  We were bound in unity.  We were the forebearers of their sacred ideas.

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The Universe was enormous.  Spanning two hundred billion galaxies, it was a riveting mammoth in size.  The creation was a movement of stealth into infinity, a descension to an Atlantis that could burn every star.  The chasm was written in virulent light.  Numbers were added up and the doctrines set forth.  The debt was in the waiter’s hands, and the fee was about to be paid.

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Our planet, Earth, is housed in what we have called our Solar System and that is the Milky Way.  Within this orbital alignment, we find Mercury to be the closest planet to the sun – this entity is something that resembles a barren rock blazing with extreme sedentary heat.  Heat, as it is currently experienced today, could bless Olympus.  It could send veritable thunderbolts like the crack of the moon.  They were aggressive whispers however – the place inhabitable like the chomping of a bull.

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The planet darted along like a ghost world – its sands more venomous than the footprint of a polar bear.  We must flee its vicinity.  We must escape its grasp.  And we must move to the next planet further away from the sun.  This sledgehammer was Venus – a recurring jewel in the night sky.

 

She tormented and beguiled many a seafarer or nightly traveller.  The heroine breathed mysteries into the sorrowful stares of unfortunate fools.  Their shattered pathway relied upon her strict instructions, as if an addiction to some opioid drug.  She was always kind and always there just as gravity knew no taint upon her soul.  Her fervent sentiments cajoled and settled oceans across the land. She became world-famous at an early stage.  For the telescopic lenses of astronomists tightened around her bustling thighs and proclaimed her as a futuristic wonderland.

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Yet our journey takes us to another precipice across this funicular system of planets.  Passing the soft breeze of our homeland, planet Earth, we find ourselves reaching the most bountiful edifice the parochial “Milky Way” has left us with.  Its namesake may well be true, its gravity like the touch of a trampoline, and its name exactly is “Mars”.  This bastion formation of a most accessible planet was originally called “Mars” because of its red appearance that was discovered through telescopes on Earth.  Early astronomers therefore thought it was a fierce land and therefore labelled it “Mars”.

 

The planet is a land rich with mountains and abundant with minerals.  It is almost as if it appears the next homeland of an expanding humanity.  Inebriated fools many slimline their drinking as they float up and down across the dancefloors.  Such bacchic revelry could desensitize their Earth-born shackles and ensure they bounce in a vitriolic state of inertia.

   

The hooligans may remain, but we must move on and explore our next planet within the “Milky Way”.  Gone are the worlds of rock and instead we find two planets made solely from gases.  These are Jupiter and Saturn.  Jupiter is an enormous gas giant.  Indeed the scale of the beast is hard to downplay.  The planet has a mass of nearly 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined.  As a gas giant, Jupiter’s atmosphere consists of 76% hydrogen and 24% helium.  Where we have admired Venus in the night sky, Jupiter is the third-brightest natural object in the Earth’s night sky, after the Moon and Venus.

 

Saturn, alternatively, is famous for its bright and extensive system of rings, which circumnavigate the planet.  Once again, its atmosphere is a savage and wild mix of helium and hydrogen.  Rest assured – this is somewhere you don’t want to go any time soon.  In fact, the gases implode through gravity so strong that it pretty much has a rocky core in the middle.

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Evading these beasts as we have done, the next stop of this tour guide reaches the solemn three planets on the outer edge of our Solar System.  No one is more austere than Uranus whose gravity at close to 15 times that of Planet Earth will ensure that you are practically strapped down to the floor.  Equally there is the fact that it is fucking freezing – expect a mean temperature of an icy 197.2 degrees Celsius.  In fact, Uranus is a rock of ice, similar in a way to eating ice creams in Siberia in winter and with no shelter.  But Uranus is not even edible.  Appearing in a cyan colour, most of the planet is made of water, ammonia and methane all of which are considered supercritical fluids, which means the pressure is not quite strong enough to force the molecules into a solid yet liquids and gases do not exist.

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One position further is our beloved Neptune, standing at the outer gravitational orbit like a Roman Militia protecting Hadrian’s Wall.  In fact, there is one more planet further than Neptune, Pluto, yet Neptune is by far the bulkier and more substantial.  Neptune is so large that once again the gravity would pull you to the ground.  However, you would never get that far as the average temperature is -218 degrees Celsius.

 

Finally, and capturing the romantic dream of many (perhaps of a plucky far away land) is the planet Pluto.  This autocratic dreamworld is thought of by many as being a second moon, where people could come and party and float up in air amidst minimal gravity.  They would therefore drink their drinks as if upon an island retreat, sliding their backs downwards and beginning to float in the air like Sleeping Beauty.  The result could only be refined luxury.  Scientifically, Pluto has roughly one-sixth of the mass of the Moon and one-third of its volume.  Yet, I’m afraid a calamity has hit our island resort.  In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) declassified Pluto as planet.  This was decided, it was made clear, because the object did not clear debris during its orbit, which was a key requirement.  When holiday-makers float upon the air or knock a tennis ball back and forth in the sky, they today label their homeland as a “Dwarf Planet” instead.

 

There is one entity, however, that might swallow a solar system up in its entirety.  Worse than a hoover to a bug or hurricane to a palm tree, these fierce phenomena are known as “Black Holes”.  Yet what lies behind the name?  Is it a hole to a new land or a hole to anywhere?  The answer is that Black Holes are simply plugs becoming denser and denser.  In fact, left alone the beasts might swallow up the Universe completely.  Stronger than an ox and probably over a quintillion times their size, the gravity becomes so strong that these beasts are even capable of attracting photons – the light is sucked out, which provides “Black Holes” with their characteristic black appearance.

    

But what drive our Universe and shine throughout the galaxies?  These are nothing else that the prodigious constellations or better known as Stars.  Inducted into frivolous folklore since ancient times, what we label as “Stars” actually refer to the enormous fireballs that send heat and light across their individual Solar System.  They are magnificent heat sources.  The heat is so powerful that it has sustained life on Earth today.  The Sun is a ball of hot plasma, which is heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core.  Essentially hydrogen atoms are fused into helium.

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There are not only one type of sun, however.  There are different stars with differing strengths and differing appearances.  The numbers within our Universe, however, distinctly form into six main types.  These are “Neutron Star”, “White Dwarf”, “Brown Dwarf”, “Red Dwarf”, “Main Sequence (Sun)” and a “Red Giant”.  Obviously, each type of star has a major impact on their solar system, determining the conditions on individual planets.  Many stars, equally, at some point can create such powerful gravity that they morph into a Black Hole, creating a rift against the expanding Universe.

 

Our Universe is enormous and includes trillions and trillions of stars.  At the centre of the entire Universe there may be some kind of colossal Black Hole or a Star of some kind.  This entity, is, in turn orbited by every galaxy in the universe.  Within each galaxy is a Galactic Centre where, again, there may be a colossal Black Hole or a Star of some kind.  Finally orbiting each Galactic Centre are the individual Solar Systems.