Adhara Cluster

Named after Dr. Fatima al-Adhara, the astronomer who discovered it, the Adhara Cluster is officially designated MCB 0315+1997. It is an open star cluster, located in the constellation of Crux, some 671 light years from the Sun. Located behind a dense "dark nebulae," it was not discovered until the mid 21st century with the aid of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Adhara Cluster in the Southern night sky

There are around 800 stars in the cluster, with an average distance between stars of about 1.5 light years. Most are G-type main-sequence stars, with a many red dwarfs and a core consisting of multiple red giants and one Neutron star, the remnants of an ancient supernova, whose gas remnants probably gave birth to the other stars in the system. Radiation pressure has blasted most gas remnants into the nearby Iona Nebulae, a stunningly beautiful formation which dominates the night sky on most planets in the cluster. Due to the statistically high number of "Potential Earth Like Worlds" (PELW) the Adhara Cluster was selected by ISSA as a destination for the Far Worlds Initiative. Ultimately, 4 Michael Collins class colony ships set out to Adhara: Raven, Pioneer, Adventure, Hammerhead, and Constance. As of the time of writing, only one ship, Raven, is confirmed to have reached its destination of Adhara 51.

Geography

There are 800 stars in the Adhara Cluster, with 23 of them possessing planets capable of supporting life, with 6 of these considered capable of permanent human habitation. Most of these stars are connected by the great Orga Trade Network, a series of deep-space stations and laser propelling arrays for efficient, long distance solar sailing. This great super structure was built over the course of 5 centuries, but the results to interstellar trade and communication have proven well worth it. lying near the center of the cluster is A89, a neutron star, produced by a supernova that was most likely the "mother" of all stars in her vicinity. This system, surprisingly for a neutron star, has a planet, A89a. Constantly baked by intense radiation sand-blasting off the planets crust, A89a is a hellish wasteland utterly incapable of sustaining life as we know it.

Localized Phenomena

When he first discovered the cluster, Dr. Zaiq Uthman noted that the age of the stars was incompatible with the distance between them - as open clusters age, they are prone to drift apart. He therefore theorized that the cluster was imbedded inside a localized pocket of Dark Matter. This idea was debated by other astronomers, who insisted that the Dark Matter sphere around our galaxy, the "Galactic Halo" must be uniform in density on such length scales. These astronomers instead pointed towards the Neutron Star A89, claiming that it had enough mass to keep the nearby stars gravitationally bound. Uthman and his supporters responded with evidence that A89's mass had been significantly over estimated. This scientific debate was still unsettled even by the time Raven and her sister ships left the solar system. One of the continuing scientific objectives of the Raven expedition is to solve this mystery. So far, the evidence favors Dr. Uthman, with strange gravitational waves betraying the presence of abnormal densities of Dark Matter - though no explanation for why such a disconformity exists has yet been proposed.

History

Some 5 Billion years ago, A89 went supernova, creating a massive nebulae, that over the next 2 billion years collected and coalesced into 100 stars. What was left of the nebulae was slowly blown away by the stars' solar winds, and very little of it remains, other than a dense cloud gravitationally bound to A89's remnant neutron star, and the Iona Nebula. Life began appearing in the Adhara Cluster very soon after the formation of the first planets 3 Billion years ago. The Yizith still possess old rock samples and fossils from their homeworld of Mahal (A22d1), dating back to about this time. It appears that the Yizith and Orga achieved space travel at about the same time, though they did not encounter each other until after the founding of Pangard. Orga records do however mention a run in with Han-Larn pirates before this time. Engi, Han-Larn and Humans are immigrants to the cluster, having evolved elsewhere in the universe; Engar is a free roaming planetoid untethered to a star that happened to be drifting through the cluster when the Engi first achieved spaceflight; the Han-Larn have been a space faring species for so long they have forgotten where exactly "Larn" was; those few Humans in the cluster are colonists and explorers from the distant world of Earth. After the Orga and Pangard made first contact, they began construction of the great Trade Network, taking them 5 centuries to expand it to most systems in the cluster. The few other species native to the cluster had not yet achieved interstellar space flight by this time, and were technologically uplifted by the Orga upon first contact. During this period, the Sarn were quite active, becoming a universally reviled menace. The civilizations of the cluster unified more than once to eradicate this foe, but every time they were declared eradicated would always come back. The frequency and intensity of Sarn attacks did generally decrease throughout the centuries however, and now-a-days sightings of their forces are quite rare. Some believe their strength has finally been whittled down to a harmless level, whilst the more pessimistic believe they have simply changed strategies, biding their time in the dark. Since the collapse of Pangard-Orga relations some 200 years ago, the Pangard have been largely confined to their own system, which is now bypassed by most trade routes.

Type

Galactic Sector

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