Brave New Worlds: The Lord of Flowers
And in the gilded house of Paradise lies nothing but ruinous death. For the peace is broken, has been broken, will forever be broken. From the lowly microbe to the cosmic Leviathans, all life knows pain. The galaxy bleeds silently, glittering ichor spilling out like tears into the inky blackness of the great beyond. Life in all its diversity struggles in the undergrowth as vast intellects, cool and unsympathetic, sate their endless appetites in the celestial canopy above.
But even such illuminated creatures as we are still beasts of the jungle. Even we are merely scraps, a brief respite from hunger for the maws of this abyssal maelstrom.
- Excerpt from Celestial Soliloquy, Operative Lymantria (2233)
Overview
Passiflora is a barred spiral galaxy belonging to the Mira Cluster. It is one of the larger members of the Mira Cluster, ranking 77th in luminosity out of the approximately 20,000 members. Its arms span a distance of over 160,000 light-years, significantly larger than the Milky Way by most estimates. However, its low density means that its mass is only some 550 billion solar masses, about half that of our own galaxy.
Like a select few of its Mira Cluster peers, Passiflora is a starburst galaxy. Its global star formation rate has risen to about 5 times that of the Milky Way, scattering giant star-forming regions across its expansive disk that are oftentimes larger and brighter than small galaxies. The influx of star-forming gases has also spurred Passiflora’s core to life as its central supermassive black hole Ensifera burns with the power of 70 million suns, powering an enormous H II region visible right across the Mira Cluster.
Galactography
Passiflora belongs to a subgroup of the Mira Cluster known as the Phalaenopsis Group. This group contains a diversity of galaxies including the giant spiral Phalaenopsis, the young irregular Armillaria, and the strange, ‘born-again’ elliptical Opuntia, among which Passiflora is one of the larger and brighter members. Most members of this group will merge together over the next few billion years, including Passiflora.
Closest of the Phalaenopsis Group is the spiral galaxy Drosera, which is about twice as massive as Passiflora. Their centers are separated by only 180,000 light-years, a minuscule amount compared to the 2 million light-years that separates us and the Andromeda Galaxy, our own nearest large neighbor. Passiflora experiences strong tidal forces because of this proximity, which caused the ongoing starburst and warped its arms into strange, looping arcs. For the inhabitants of Passiflora, Drosera looms large in the night sky as an eternal reminder of their minuscule place in the wider cosmos.
Part 1. The Beating Heart of the Galaxy
Nuclear rings and spirals are not rare features of barred galaxies, but are spectacular things nonetheless. This one in the heart of NGC 4314 is a good model for Passiflora’s, with numerous young blue stars and shocked, reddish nebulae.
At the very center of Passiflora lies its supermassive black hole, Ensifera, and its surroundings. The black hole itself is very similar to the Milky Way’s Sagittarius A* but it is much more active. It has an extensive accretion disk which spews relativistic jets moving at nearly the speed of light, though these features are miniature in scale compared to those found in some other galaxies, both in our locality of the universe and the Mira Cluster.
Like Sagittarius A*, Ensifera is surrounded by a massive star cluster. Unlike in the majority of galaxies but like the Milky Way, the stars in this cluster vary greatly in age from infant protostars just a few thousand years old to aging giants almost as old as the Universe. Even today, the outer edges of Ensifera’s accretion disk occasionally stir up new stars, though this process must have been much more active in the recent past to create the hundreds of massive blue stars that swarm through the cluster. Combined together, the million or so stars of the nuclear cluster have a mass almost equal to that of Ensifera itself.
Surrounding all this is the Oculus Nebula, a luminous, complex H II region which wholly encases the galactic center. Though a little more than 500 light-years across, it is just as bright if not brighter than the many great nebulae in Passiflora’s arms. It resembles a giant eye or a much larger version of the Helix Nebula, with large numbers of newborn stars encased in a rapidly-eroding dust cocoon beyond which numerous filaments stretch like giant eyelashes. The light of Ensifera barely penetrates the dust envelope that surrounds its equator but shines bright through the cavities punched by its relativistic jets, which allows the galaxy’s heart to be seen a million light-years away.
Like those of all galaxies, Passiflora’s nucleus is packed with stars just fractions of light-years apart. The gravitational influences of swarming stars strip off all but the closest planets from their hosts, while blasts of ionizing radiation emitted by Ensifera frequently leave the whole region in a sterile state. But for those few worlds that make it in this killing field, it is a beauty to behold. These are worlds lit eternally by a sky of a billion stars and the blazing heart of the galaxy, drifting through the fumes of the crucible of creation as new worlds crystallize from the void all around. Perhaps it is a shame, then, that nothing living may witness such a sight.
Part 2. Rings Upon Rings
Passiflora is really quite similar to that of the Dorado Group’s NGC 1672, if somehow even more flamboyant. The ring in this galaxy is much dimmer than its core, but Passiflora’s extended gas distribution ensures a more even spread.
Beyond the blazing heart of the galaxy lies a region of great chaos. The Passiflora Bar, which stretches across the central third of the galaxy, dominates this region. In addition to swarms of old stars, the bar contains the Lacustra Caelestis, two enormous streams of gas and dust that flow from the outer disk to the galactic core.
This celestial river’s mouth ends at Passiflora’s nuclear ring, a 3,000 light year-wide circlet of bright nebulae and populous star clouds around 10 million years old. This region, sometimes referred to as the Hellmouth, contains at least 10,000 massive O-type stars that together shine twice as bright as Ensifera and the nuclear star cluster combined.
There is not much star formation in the galactic bar besides some localized regions along the Lacustra Caelestis’ densest dust clouds. Beyond it however, is another ring of star birth; the aptly-named Ring of Fire. This 30,000 light-year-long band encircles Passiflora’s central bar and is the base from which its two great arms erupt. It is also an exceptionally active star-forming region - it forms stars at around thrice the integrated rate of the nuclear ring, but since it is ten times larger the activity is somewhat more spread out.
The bar and rings are quite dense with stars, though not as much as the galactic nucleus. Supernovae are not uncommon here, as they are spawned both by the deaths of short-lived massive stars and the mergers of ancient white dwarfs. They are too far to threaten the inhabited regions of the outer rim, but occasional gamma-ray bursts caused by the birth of black holes in the rings can indeed sterilize inhabited planets. Unlike the dust-shrouded core of the galaxy, the outermost Ring of Fire features prominently in the skies of those planets on the inner edge of the galaxy’s arms, lighting up the skies in a brilliant display of nebulae and young blue star clusters.
Part 3. The Great Expanse
UGC 1810, a distorted spiral galaxy in a similar situation as Passiflora. Like it, the outer arms of this galaxy have become broken and distended as a result of tides from its neighbor UGC 1813.
The remaining three-quarters of Passiflora is the domain of its arms. As is common for barred spiral galaxies, there are only two arms, the Euplokamis and Dryodora Arms, which are waves of dense gas and stars in Passiflora’s disk driven by the gravitational force of its bar. Imperfections in this density wave and perturbations from other galaxies cause each of the arms to branch repeatedly, forming dozens of accessory arms. Star formation in isolated regions also spawns small spurs and bridging filaments that link the star-forming regions of the arms across the great gulfs of old, dim stars that divide them. Altogether, some 24 named minor arms and spurs have been mapped, along with innumerable smaller irregularities undeserving of special nomenclature.
The main arms eventually loop back on themselves, forming a fragmented outer ring. The ring may have once been complete, like in our Messier 96 or Mira’s members Pecteilis and Lithops, but as it is at the very edge of the galactic disk, the gravitational torques exerted by Drosera have shattered it. Its current form is maintained only by its sheer size - the ring’s constituent star clouds have long become unbound from each other and will scatter to an unrecognizable state within 100 million years.
At the base of the Euplokamis Arm is an area of space some 20,000 light-years wide. This region, the Local Volume, contains several hundred cross-communicating civilizations and is the only region of Passiflora definitively known to host intelligent life. The Local Volume includes the Euplokamis Spine, a vast region of thick dust and scattered star-forming regions, as well as both sides of the arm itself, most of the small Velamen Spur, as well as a small portion of the outer Ring of Fire. Though small in comparison to the galaxy at large, this region is more than large enough to house a whole host of strange peoples and stranger stories spread across a billion island worlds.
Part 4. Euplokamis-Velamen Axis
The Large Magellanic Cloud’s Tarantula Nebula is a fair analogue for Passiflora’s Gordian Reach, as a giant complex of star-forming regions chock full of brilliant blue giants.
The Local Volume, despite its small size compared to the entirety of the galaxy, is an enormously diverse region. The region of the Euplokamis Arm contained within contains two large star-forming regions; the Euplokamis Base, at the junction between the Arm and the Ring of Fire where the great gas streams collide, and the Gordian Reach, a giant complex of tightly knotted dust bands and star-forming regions. The latter contains some thirty emission nebulae more than 100,000 times as luminous as the Sun, while dimmer nebulae number in the thousands. The brightest and largest of all, the Comatula Nebula, exceeds 5 million times the brightness of the Sun and stretches for an immense 2400 light-years, lit by the titanic radiation output of five newborn globular clusters at its heart. Some 1 billion young (<100 Ma) stars call the Gordian Reach home along with an equal number of older stars immured in the structure.
With such intense star formation, the Local Volume is highly energetic. The region is littered with supernova remnants, x-ray binaries, and cataclysmic variables that attest to the fast rate of stellar turnover, while young stars condensing from the luminous gas of the Gordian Reach blast their surroundings with jets of radiation and unstable young clusters hurl runaway stars like supersonic bullets through the dreadful fireworks of the Reach. Though not thoroughly sterilized like the galactic core, survival in the Gordian Reach is still difficult. The beauty of its skies may be little consolation, but the unfettered, effectively-limitless outpouring of energy that makes the region so infamous is an opportunity all the same for those beings clever enough to use it.
