The Polynoe System: The Transient Mortality
Overview
Polynoe is a young single star system on the outskirts of the Nereis Cluster, one of the numerous young star clusters across Passiflora’s outer disk given life by the present gravitational interaction with Drosera. It and its stellar siblings do not belong to any wider association, having condensed from a single cloud of interstellar gas a hundred million years ago and leaving nothing behind after a series of great supernovae. While wide systems usually have trouble surviving the rigors of life in a cluster, Polynoe’s young age and marginal position ensures catastrophic, system-destroying encounters do not happen too often.
Polynoe has no native lifeforms, as it is much too young to develop any semblance of complex life. All life which does exist in the system has been brought from elsewhere by colonizing sapient species and remains highly limited in scope.
Despite being located in one of the most highly contested regions of the Gordian Reach, Polynoe and the Nereis Cluster have remained relatively untouched by previous waves of settlement. It has been tens of millions of years since the last truly massive stars of the cluster died and other options like the Comatula core formed. The system itself currently belongs to an independent corporation-state originally hailing from Phyllodoce who reside in the outer asteroid belts of its gas giants.
The First and Only Sun: Polynoe, the Stillborn Paradise
Polynoe itself is a young A5 blue-white star quite similar to our Beta Pictoris. With around 1.72 times the Sun’s mass and nearly 9 times its luminosity, this massive star will live for only about 1.6 billion years. Nevertheless, its present age of just 100 million years means that it is just 6% of the way through its total lifetime. It is a high-amplitude Delta Scuti variable, brightening to twice its base luminosity every 3 hours before dimming back down to normal in the same time. The star rotates rapidly, bulging out at the equator and causing severe magnetic disturbances.
The instability of Polynoe has not deterred the formation of a planetary system around it. Two hot super-Earths and four massive gas giants circle the star at distances up to 140 astronomical units, further than the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. While the two terrestrial planets lock each other in a tight resonance where they mutually perturb each other, the gas giants resemble those of the Solar System, with no resonant relationships and wide spacing.
The Cenomanian Series
With two remnant rocky worlds and a massive gas giant, the Cenomanian Series represents the arrested development of a Hot Jupiter. The super-Earths Antalis and Graptacme probably represent the remnants of a resonant chain of terrestrial planets like the ones in Oceanus or our TRAPPIST-1 that destroyed itself in a series of massive collisions after the inner edge went unstable with the continuous pressure of giant Gorgonia. Gorgonia likely would have travelled further inwards, but the fast evolution of A-type Polynoe dissipated the gas of the protoplanetary disk before it was able to take its place in the core of the system.
Members of the Cenomanian Series
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Indict a world with a stolen face. This eccentric super-Earth consists of a rocky core buried under a thick layer of carbon. Though its graphite fields and half-solid asphalt pools may disguise its true nature, its cracked face bleeds a brilliant, revealing flow of granite and rhyolite veins.
Antalis hides its scarred self with little success.
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Witness a planet slain in the womb. This Venus-like world lost even the ghost of oceans in the unforgiving glare of Polynoe, left with only the acidic remnants of what could have been. Such worlds are sadly common throughout the universe, stripped of potential by vengeful hosts.
Graptacme does not mourn what never could come.
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Investigate a resilient world, surviving even in the face of stellar chaos. This massive gas giant occupies a narrow region of relative habitability between the irregular fluctuations of Polynoe, just wide enough for a work of six ocean moons and then some.
Gorgonia spits in the face of the arrogant divine.
The Huronian Series
The three frozen giants of the Huronian Series represent a mostly intact primordial gas giant system. All three formed relatively late and were unable to capture each other into resonance, resulting in a relatively robust system with weak planet-planet interactions. However, they are vulnerable to star-star interactions due to the large size of their orbits and will inevitably go unstable when Polynoe loses its atmosphere at the end of its life. Nevertheless, things remain serene for now. As with all the giants of the Polynoe System, they have large arrangements of planetary-mass moons from nine to a whopping twenty-five.
Members of the Huronian Series
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Behold the shattered remnants of a grand past. The large moons of this giant shattered each other in gravitational instabilities not long after forming. Their fragmented remnants, now in the form of an astounding thirty-nine interior moons of all sizes and shapes, circle the planet in memory of this lost history. It is perhaps in awe of this past that this world is granted its Authorship.
Xenia frolics in a field of dismembered corpses.
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Observe a world carrying on a predecessor’s memory. This sienna giant closely resembles what its inner neighbor Xenia once was, with a tight series of large, atmospheric moons. Though not particularly grandiose in itself, the demure beauty of this world deserves well the title of Author.
Isidella persists as a testament to what we have lost.
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Study a world of great excesses. At the edge of the system, this purpureous giant’s deep gravitational basin has accumulate all sorts of hangers-on in its eons of existence, including a series of no less than eleven oceanic moons. With such staggering numbers, there is little dispute to its Authorship.
Anthothela tends its frigid menagerie with little care for the outside world.
