The Prismic Dust Cloud

When you get to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, just to the point when the gravitational forces only just start to try to get a grip of you, quickly turn left, and have a look at the fabulous distorted dust cloud known as the Prismic Dust Cloud. The light from the myriad of stars, together with the swirling dust particles and reflected and refracted light, plus water molecules cause the light to shimmer, creating a scattered rainbow effect which warps and wraps around itself a thousand times in the blink of an eye.

Due to the volatile nature of that particular region in space, small black holes, or eddies, create and fold in on themselves, which also add to the dancing rainbow kaleidoscope effect.

There’s a central white burst of light at the centre, which holds a more stable black eddy, which is thought to be a gateway to another part of the Universe beyond, although no probes sent into the eddy have ever returned any data.

But back to the dust cloud.

Watch on as the colours blend together in ways that shouldn’t be possible, creating colours that have never been seen… and look beyond the cloud, through the vast array of stars, until you find one yellow one, one amongst a million, which is home.

Don’t stay looking too long, however, as the Milky Way’s black hole has an uncanny knack of catching passing travellers unaware, who are very often never seen again.