Pendulum

The Pendulum system is vitally important to galactic civilization, as it is the Galactic Democratic Federation’s primary universal timekeeping mechanism –hence the name. It consists of a black hole of roughly ten standard solar masses, called the Eye of Chronos (or simply Chronos) with an unstable degenerate star (the Pendulum itself) and a massive construct (the Cycler) in its orbit. Temporal metric aside, it is also galactographically important: both the radial meridian and planar meridian pass through the system.

The Eye of Chronos

The Eye of Chronos, more often just called Chronos, is a singularity that is presumed to have formed from the death of a high-mass star several billion cycles ago. It has no accretion disk, but emits slightly higher than standard amounts of evaporative radiation. It is orbited by two objects in close proximity to each other. The Pendulum pulsar has an orbital semimajor axis of roughly one billion kilocaudons, and the Cycler megastructure which monitors the Pendulum's radiation orbits Chronos just slightly further out. Thanks to its marginally higher orbital speed, the Cycler is able to keep exact pace with the Pendulum, staying in the same position relative to the pulsar in order to accurately measure the time between its emissions.

The Pendulum

The Pendulum itself is an active neutron star, or pulsar, estimated to be around half a billion cycles old. The pulsar emits twin jets of high-frequency radiation at its magnetic poles, which lie at an almost 90-degree angle to its rotational axis. Each radiation jet has a rotation period of exactly two arcons, and the rotation has shown no sign of slowing down in the last several hundred million cycles. Since this object displays the most precisely periodic behavior in the known universe (excluding quantum phenomena), it was agreed during the Aehr-Thyoran Concordat that the Pendulum’s half-rotation period would become the new common base unit of time.

The Cycler

The periodic radiation of the Pendulum is tracked by a moon-sized construct in a neighboring orbit called the Cycler. The Cycler was built by the ancient Aehr to keep time in larger units than the arcon. It is a complex mechanical structure that monitors the regular sweeps of radiation from the pulsar and subsequently calculates the increasingly large units of time derived from the period of the Pendulum. Though built to house thousands of individuals, the Cycler is typically only inhabited by a skeleton crew of a few hundred.

Pulsar by Elcor785

Basic Information

Type

Star System

Designation

GB00.04.00S2-n1x1-35

Location

Inner Rim, Regal Arm, Orranysis galaxy

Coordinates

(0,4.15,0)

System Structure

System diameter (farthest orbit)

1.21e+9 kk (Cycler)

System mass

12.2 M_sol

Endemic Bodies

Central object

Chronos

Stellar type

N

Known stars

1 (X-class stellar remnant)

Constructs

1