Silky Way

The Silky Way is an immense ring galaxy, and the largest galaxy in the Local Cluster. Constant star formation is one of the primary characteristics that make up the personality of the galaxy, leading to an exceptionally high quantity of early-type main-sequence stars in vast, diffuse, starforming nebulae spread across the reaches of the galaxy. The Silky Way is an exceedingly fertile area, inhabited by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of intelligent species and an even larger proportion of interstellar civilizations. The variety between the hundreds of forms of life is absolutely immense, ranging from carbon-based to silicon-based to having a solvent of liquid ammonia.

The galaxy's central hub of political activity is the nebulous ring that encircles the galactic core. The core itself is a region left as uninhabited as the void beyond the Silky Way, as the fall of the Qomarat Empire by civil wars and the later eruption of the supermassive black hole's accretion disk cleansed the region of any life. The core, regardless, is a fascinating region in scientific regard as it contains Demos, the central supermassive black hole of the galaxy, which binds it together as a star binds a planetary system. Between the two aforementioned regions is a vast cosmic gap as desolate as the emptiest voids, home to rogue states bickering for smidgens of resources in a state of perpetual turmoil unseen by the wider galaxy.

In terms of pure power alone, the most potent civilization was considered to be the Void, a single machine-hive-mind that had consumed much of the stars of the galactic ring. Before its destruction in the Battle of the Colony in 150 AC, it posed an existential threat to all within the Silky Way, whether they were right next door or across the galaxy. Its influence was unmatched by any other in existence, standing only in the shadows of ancient galactic empires buried deep by the sands of time. All other states in the modern galaxy are limited to their own Seed Cluster, with none coming anywhere near the heights of of the ancient nations. In addition, civilizations of every type reside within the galaxy, ranging from vast interstellar empires entrenched in blood, to utopias purely residing within virtual simulated universes, to totalitarian states characterized by brainwashing and the disregard for universal rights.

History

This galaxy formed almost 13 billion years ago, so not much is known about its early history. After its formation, the galaxy was mostly uninhabitable, filled with starbursts, supernovae, and even a quasar at its center. The only life was formed in the sparser edge of the ring and the galactic halo, where resources were scarce at that time. This meant that any life which formed this early either wasn't able to expand beyond their home system and died with it, or were killed by a wayward giant star.

After this period, things were more habitable, and several civilizations formed, each controlling a significant fraction of the galaxy. Unfortunately, a quasar outburst from Demos caused severe damage to these empires and killed off many nascent species arising inbetween them. The severely damaged Seven Nations would quickly collapse in infighting caused by the renewed resource scarcity, leaving the galaxy empty for a time. After the Seven Nations vanished, life would rise again, sporadically attempting to spread across the galaxy before their inevitable destruction at the hands of some natural disaster of internal turmoil. As a result, there were likely a number of species that survived for over a billion years and never maintained a cohesive state for more than a percent of that timespan at once, but the rise of the next galactic empire would put an end to these stragglers from an earlier time.

Roughly 1.5 billion years ago, the Qomarat Empire arose in the deep core of the Silky Way, spreading across the galaxy and enslaving or destroying almost everyone they encountered. Civilizations that had stood across various iterations for literal billions of years were wiped off the map, including the Ancient Builders of Nalaren and probably many others. The Empire built the unique Flashpoint Network to allow fast-travel between the outer reaches of their territory back to the capital. Luckily for the future species of the galactic ring, the populace of the Qomarat Empire was "mysteriously" afflicted by a morphogenic virus spread from Nalaren in an effort by the Ancient Builders to preserve their species. This virus would later be found dormant on Nalaren itself billions of years later by the Tyran Empire and put to use for its own nefarious purpose.

This was a pandemic on a scale never before seen. There was no cure for the morphogenic virus, and much of the population of the outer empire died in mental agony as their bodies were twisted into those their empire killed. To prevent the pandemic from reaching the core systems, a complete quarantine was enacted over all effected sectors of the empire, and the Flashpoint beacons were shut down. Due to the ponderous legislature of the Empire, whatever form it may have had, the virus had run wild over much of the ring, and this quarantine caused them to instantaneously lose nearly half of their territory as those left within quickly died out. Shortly after they abandoned the last of their holdings in the galactic ring, the Empire broke out into civil war between a variety of political factions and possibly religious groups as well. Little is known about the war, but it is known that it was so massive and long-lasting that it cleansed the entire region of any semblance of life and utterly destroyed the last remnants of the Empire. The last of its species locked themselves in stasis vaults hidden beneath the crusts of many planets to preserve the memory of their great empire. Many of these still exist, particularly on their home planet Qomar, which now orbits Demos itself after being ejected from its original parent star. Aside from these vaults, there is absolutely no native life remaining in the galactic core.

Following the death of the Qomarat Empire, most of the galaxy was lifeless save simple bacterial life, and the core was so irradiated by the war and later activity by Demos as to eradicate even that. After the fall of the Empire, nothing of its size would ever rise again. Nothing general can really be said be said about galactic history, as anything said about the Ervo Sector probably wouldn't apply to the Astros Sector, which wouldn't apply to the Istraki Sector. Thus, after this point it is most useful to describe the histories of individual regions.

The only commonality across many of the thousands of disparate Seed Clusters was the impending threat of the Void. Roughly 60,000 years ago, the Void first appeared in the Hiram Sector, likely emerging from an ill-fated civilization's application of the Gray Goo scenario. This machine hive-mind expanded rapidly, consuming the whole of the Hiram Sector and wiping out all other nations within over the next ten thousand years. Many powerful civilizations put up a fight, but soon they were all extinguished and their worlds devoured by the Void. This only ended in 150 AC, when the Void was finally extinguished by the sacrifice of Su'uni Ash Nikal.

Characteristics

A nearly perfect ring of stars of all ages and kinds circles the older yellow nucleus of this galaxy. The ring structure is so circular that its inhabitants consider their home galaxy the prototype for the classification. The diameter of the inner core, separated from the galactic ring where everyone lives, is approximately 17,000 light-years while the surrounding ring extends from 37,500 to 62,000 light-years from the central black hole of Demos. With a mass of over 1 trillion solar masses, the Silky Way is by far the largest and most populated galaxy in its local neighborhood.

The expansive gap separating the galactic core and ring may contain some star clusters too faint to be detected, alongside the confirmed presence of a smattering of the halo population of globulars. As ring galaxies are extremely rare, the nearest other one is over 300 million light-years distant and remains unnamed by all the civilizations who live here. The luminous galactic ring lies at the inner edge of a much more expansive ring of neutral hydrogen gas.

Size and Mass

The Silky Way is the largest galaxy within its local cluster, although the exact edge of the galaxy is ill-defined. Long-range probe observations suggest that most of the stars within the galactic ring are between 41-58 thousand light-years from the galactic core, and that the number of stars beyond that point dramatically peters out towards the edge and merges with the galactic halo. Most definitions of the "edge of the galaxy" rely on when it stops being clearly opaque and visible against intergalactic space, which is difficult to apply to a galaxy you have never left, but estimations generally agree on a diameter of ~125,000 light-years. This value is slightly above the mean diameters of galaxies in the local universe (92,000 ly), showing that the Silky Way is not an overly large galaxy but just somewhat above the norm.

Recent studies have uncovered the presence of a ringlike filament of stars encircling the galaxy multiple times, likely originating from the rapidly disintegrating Majestic Galaxy and rippling above and below the mostly flat galactic plane at a variable diameter from 80,000 to 160,000 light-years or so. Disk stars are also technically present at low densities out to this distance, although they are nowhere near bright or plentiful enough to extend the visible boundaries of the galactic ring.

Observations of subtle space-time distortions by local civilizations have determined that the Silky Way's dark matter halo extends to roughly 1,242,000 light-years from Demos, translating to a diameter of almost 2.5 million light-years. The galactic ring is estimated to be around 6,000 light-years thick.

In terms of mass, the Silky Way is approximately 1.6 trillion stellar masses, although actual stars make up a small fraction of this. Measurements with the Rutav-based Tholian Array in the Kherlus System found velocities as large as 250 km/s for stars at the outer edge of the Silky Way, suggesting a high mass of 8 • 10¹¹ M_☉ within 160,000 light-years of its center. A more recent estimate of 1.61 • 10¹² M_☉ is more generally agreed upon for the entire galaxy.

Much of the mass within the Silky Way seems to be dark matter, an undetectable and invisible form of matter which only interacts with regular matter gravitationally. This dark matter halo is predicted to extend uniformly to a distance beyond 300,000 light-years, before beginning to peter out to true intergalactic space by 1.2 million. The mass of this dark matter is likely in the vicinity of 2.2 trillion M_☉, vastly dwarfing the stars in the galaxy with their mass of 720 billion M_☉.

In addition to the hundreds of billions of stars, interstellar gas comprising roughly 90% hydrogen and 10% helium by mass pervades the galactic ring and, to a lesser extent, the core. Roughly 2/3 of the hydrogen remains in atomic form, something which is extremely rare in more concentrated situations. The mass of the Silky Way's interstellar gas is approximately 20% of the mass of the stars which it surrounds, with dust adding an additional 1%.

The Silky Way contains between 200 and 600 billion stars and up to twice as many planets. An exact figure would depend on exactingly thorough explorations of the desolate space between Seed Clusters to detect every super-low-mass star. This is made difficult by the extreme difficulty in detection of these stars at distances greater than 1000 light-years away from a given civilization. The Silky Way also likely contains around 15 billion white dwarfs like Alara, 1 billion neutron stars, and 100 million stellar black holes. The space between these objects is filled by a rarefied soup of gas and dust known as the interstellar medium, which varies drastically in density across the galactic ring and makes up the great nebulae which surround many Seed Clusters.

The galactic ring does not have discrete inner and outer edges beyond which the presence of stars simply ceases. However, it does decrease in concentration sharply off the visible edges of the ring structure, dropping off greatly beyond a radius of ~60,000 light-years and beneath a radius of ~39,000 light-years. Beyond the galactic ring lies a great halo of diffusely scattered stars and globular clusters arranged in a vaguely spherical shape, its size limited by the presence of the Flax and Cotton Galaxies' closest approaches of roughly 200,000 light-years. Beyond this distance, the orbits of halo objects would be disrupted by these satellite galaxies and this zone is traditionally defined as intergalactic space. The aggregate absolute magnitude of the galaxy is approximately 21.7.

Exploration by every civilization across the Galactic Ring has shown the presence of substantially more star-bound planets than the stars they orbit, with estimates ranging from 1.4 to 2.1 planets per star depending on how good their telescopes are. Equally, there are at least as many rogue planets as there are stars and possibly more than there are star-bound planets. At least 900 million planets habitable to someone or another exist in the Silky Way, the vast majority of which (~99.97%) are found within Seed Clusters. Interstellar asteroids are also extremely common within the space between stars, at uncountable numbers due to the vagaries of solar system formation.

Upon these 900 million planets, uncountable civilizations have arisen across history through the stars of the galaxy. While many fell before they left the atmosphere and still more collapsed to various causes, thousands of them today populate the stars of the Silky Way, expanding and engineering their environment however they see fit. Alongside these modern nations, the stars are filled with the ghosts of the dead, with ancient civilizations like the Qomarat Empire, Karvelia, and the Ancient Builders of Nalaren leaving behind innumerable ruins like the Pillar of Heaven and the Flashpoint Network which predate every living species. Still more are lost to time, whether wiped away by the ravages of the Void or simply eroded to nothing by the passage of the eons.

Galactic Geography

The exact galactic geography of the Silky Way has been hotly debated, as it was often decided rather arbitrarily by whatever nation was most powerful at the time. As a result, what defines a distinct region of the Silky Way has changed time and time again, going from being based on distance from the core, to being based on arbitrary lines, to being based on how far above or below the disk you are.

Population Concentrations

The Silky Way's civilizations are generally tightly concentrated around stellar nurseries and star clusters sometimes referred to as "seeds", with inhabited worlds in the hinterlands beyond few and far between. Every galactic sector contains several such concentrations, with a wide range in size. For example, the Ervo Sector contains the Vernarca Nebula with a number of states within and around it referred to simply as the "Ervo Sector powers" by political analysts and this wiki.

Other smaller seeds exist in the sector of varying viability, like the Algor Cluster's tightly packed collection of high-mass stars where the Obilehem Intelligence can be found. Across the galactic ring, the Hinthorn Sector is mostly occupied by the vast Apple Nebula, with a great number of civilizations spread through the region.

The Core

The Core is the innermost and densest region of the Silky Way. Its borders range from the supermassive black hole, Demos, to the rapid fall-off of stellar density at the edge of The Gap. This region is the most densely packed of any galactic region in this galaxy, with the average distance between non-gravitationally bound stars only reaching a third of a light-year, and a total star count estimated to be twenty billion stars, roughly a fifth of the galaxy's entire star count.

The Core is almost completely devoid of star-forming gas, and has been for most of its history. This is likely because most of it was excited into forming stars or ejected by Demos' most recent quasar phase, roughly 5 billion years ago. Today, Demos is an active black hole, with a large accretion disk.

After the civil war which precipitated the destruction of the Qomarat Empire, the region was reduced to nothing but desolate, lifeless worlds, a far cry from its former glory. Today, small sections of the region are controlled by small nations which emigrated from elsewhere in the galaxy for various reasons, but there are no native life-forms surviving outside of hardened vaults built by the remnants of the Qomarat.

The layout of the Core consists of an extremely dense cluster surrounding Demos to a distance of roughly five light-years. This cluster contains over a thousand stars, the vast majority of which have no planets. This cluster is nestled within a less dense, but still very dense cluster often known as the Deep Core. The cluster contains a good deal of rogue planets by virtue of the density of the cluster, as this causes many gravitational interactions between stars. Outside the Deep Core, many smaller clusters have coalesced.

The galactic center itself is marked by the intense radio source surrounding the supermassive black hole of Demos, 55,000 light-years away from the Vernarca Nebula. During the FSS Kareland's visit to the region on its voyage home, Demos was properly curveyed and explored for the first time since the fall of the Qomarat Empire, and constitutes an active galactic nucleus with an impressive and radiation-loud accretion disk and collection of stars surrounding it.

Gamma rays and X-rays

Since the earliest observations of the core by the modern civilizations of the galactic ring, two massive spherical bubbles of high-energy gamma-ray emission have been detected to the north and south of the galactic core. Each bubble is approximately 40,000 light-years across, and surrounds a smaller and more concentrated formation resulting from current and past active outbursts of Demos.

The Gap

The Gap is widely considered the most dull region of the Silky Way, and is defined as the region between the outer edge of the Core and the inner edge of the Ring. The Gap is almost as sparse as intergalactic space. The Gap, because of its extreme sparseness, has largely not been colonized by any nation, with the exception of globular clusters. A notable exception to this rule is the widespread nYaucto Teyno, a nation spread across thousands of dim red dwarves within the deep of the Gap.

The Gap also contains many globular clusters, including the Web Cluster and the Cerlus Cluster. These clusters are hotspots of civilization in the wilds of The Gap, and as such they are highly sought after by expansionist nations. There is also one anomalous artificial cluster found within this region, that being the Niblos Cluster, the structured arrangement of which implying artificial creation.

The Ring

The Ring is the most habitable and populous region of The Silky Way, and is home to such notable planets as Teralla, Dosi, Telach, Kormin, and others. It is a neat ring of stars with sharp borders at the inner and outer edges, defining the extent of the region. It is the largest region of the Silky Way by star count, at roughly 300 billion stars.

From within the galaxy, it is difficult to quickly ascertain the exact structure of the galactic ring, but as far as can be told it is somewhat asymmetric in structure and may be composed in part of tightly wound spiral-arm equivalents. A variety of star forming regions can be found within the ring, which generally correspond to concentrations of life such as the Vernarca Nebula, Apple Nebula, Karvel Cluster, and other such areas.

Various civilizations have been founded within the ring, including the Vernarcan Federation, the nations of the Alliance of Five, the Karvel Clans, the Kormin Empire, and many, many others. The average distance between stars in this region is roughly 2 and a half light-years, and it is also the most civilized region of the galaxy.

Just like the Gap, the Ring was partially conquered by the Qomarat Empire at its height, and large swathes of it are littered with abandoned megastructures left behind as the outer reaches of the empire began to suffer from the Losekran Morphogenic Virus.

Galactic Halo

The galactic core and ring are surrounded by a roughly spherical halo of old stars and globular clusters, of which 90% lie within 120,000 light-years from Demos. Some globulars have been found at greater distances, like the Net Cluster at over 200,000 light-years distant. About 40% of these clusters orbit on retrograde orbits compared to the rotation of the galactic ring, and are not bound to elliptical keplerian orbits due to the diffuse nature of the mass that they orbit.

Unlike the ring, the halo contains extremely little in the way of obscuring dust and gas, meaning that star formation does not take place here. Open clusters also only exist in the ring.

The presence of the Linum Galaxy led to the discovery of a great ribbon of galactic debris as the polar orbit of the galaxy and its interaction with the Silky Way's gravity slowly tears it apart. Similarly the Yutze Overdensity is the origin of a similar ring of debris encircling the galaxy, although the Overdensity's status as a galaxy is much more in debate.

From a geopolitical perspective, the Galactic Halo is the still sparsest region of the Silky Way. It is not home to many nations, as it is even sparser than the Gap, and all outposts of civilization are in the many globular clusters in the region, such as the Web Cluster and Net Cluster. The Halo also, depending on your definition of its boundaries, encompasses some of the closer satellites. It is the largest region of the galaxy in terms of volume, but its stars are very spread apart with average distances between stars being upwards of ten light-years. Because of this sparseness, this region is difficult to govern, and the few nations here have developed their own strategies for governing this region.

Gaseous Halo

In addition to the stellar halo, the telescopes of every civilization have uncovered evidence of a further gaseous halo composed primarily of superheated gas akin to a galactic version of a stellar corona. This halo extends for hundreds of thousands of light-years, much farther than the stellar halo and almost reaching the distance of the Flax and Cotton galaxies. The mass of this hot halo is almost equivalent to the mass of the rest of the Silky Way, with a temperature between 1 to 2.5 million K, although the gas being even more rarefied than interstellar gas prevents this from having any practical effect.

Galactic Rotation

Like most galaxies, the rotation period of the Silky Way varies by location. The orbital velocity of stars depends surprisingly little on the given star's distance from Demos, meaning that its orbital period depends almost entirely on simply the physical length of the orbit. This is because the ostensible orbital parent of every object within the galaxy is outmassed sixty to one by the objects orbiting it, which means that in practice any object orbits every object beneath it as a group.

The unusually rapid rotation of the galactic ring as a whole was also the earliest proof of dark matter, which would later be discovered in the flesh in high-energy particle accelerators. If the Silky Way consisted exclusively of baryonic matter, it would take nearly five times as long for the stars of the ring to make one revolution around the galaxy.

Political Regions

The Silky Way's galactic ring is difficult to divide further into non-arbitary physical regions, and is so divided for catalogue convenience into twenty-six sectors, as follows:

For more, read the Index section or their respective articles.

Intergalactic Neighborhood

The Silky Way and its smaller companion of Filarsa make up the center of a group of seventy closely bound galaxies known as the Haven Group, adjacent to the Elysium Cluster and the greater Crown Supercluster. Surrounding the Crown Supercluster are a number of great voids almost completely devoid of galaxies.

Three smaller galaxies and a number of dwarf galaxies within the Haven Group orbit the Silky Way. By far the largest of these is the lenticular galaxy of Filarsa, orbiting 750,000 light-years away and massing almost a fifth that of the Silky Way itself. Filarsa is large enough to hold on to its own collection of companions. The ultrafaint galaxy of Asharbyel remains the only galaxy outside of the Silky Way to be visited by modern civilizations of the galaxy, due to its access through the Bakran Wormhole recently discovered in the deep Hinthorn Sector.

The second and third largest satellites are the elliptical Cotton Galaxy and starburst irregular Flax Galaxy. The two galaxies are likely dynamically linked, and a stream of neutral hydrogen bridges the gap between them, thought to have been dragged from the two galaxies by tidal interaction with the Silky Way. Other dwarf galaxies orbiting the Silky Way include Linum (the closest), Zangi, Sarjul, and a multitude of more miniscule ones.

The smallest satellites of the Silky Way are under 500 light-years in diameter and barely qualify for the title. These include Treita III and IV, Asontes, and the debatably classified Yutze Dwarf or Overdensity. There are also some dwarf galaxies which have already been consumed and digested by the gravity of the Silky Way, including the progenitor of the Web Cluster.

Notable Satellites

Filarsa

The largest satellite of the Silky Way, Filarsa is a metal-poor lenticular galaxy found 750,000 light-years away from it. It is also the third largest galaxy within the Haven Group, behind the Silky Way itself and the distant Erian galaxy. Filarsa is also one of the prototypes for the seyfert class of galaxies, and an active galaxy just like its parent although to a greater extent. Filarsa has a number of smaller satellites of its own, including the bright starburst irregular of Ho'a.

Majestic

Among the closest satellites of the Silky Way, the Majestic Galaxy is a miniscule irregular being slowly torn apart by its parent galaxy. At present, it orbits under 40,000 light-years away from Demos with over half of its original stars scattered along a great stellar stream. Majestic is the initial home galaxy of the Vondunke and origin of the Celeor State found today in the Apple Nebula.

Linum Galaxy

The Linum Galaxy is a small satellite of the Silky Way, orbiting just beyond the edge of the galactic ring. Its small size, polar orbit, and close proximity to the galaxy means that it is being slowly pulled apart by its gravity. Similar to Majestic, it is the source of a great stellar stream, but this one is substantially larger due to the greater size of the progenitor mass.

Flax Galaxy

Widely considered to be the closest of the major satellites, the Flax Galaxy is a large irregular starbust galaxy roughly 200,000 light-years away from the Silky Way. The Flax and Cotton Galaxies are dynamically linked, and possess a stream of neutral hydrogen passing between them. Telescopes of Silky Way civilizations have detected evidence of mass-scale development across the Flax Galaxy, implying that a large civilization may exist here.

Cotton Galaxy

The Cotton Galaxy is the closest elliptical galaxy to the Silky Way at approximately 250,000 light-years away from Demos, and is often considered to be a companion to the Flax Galaxy. The galaxy has not entertained any stellar formation for at least the past several billion years, and so is unlikely to host much, if any, native life.

Asharbyel

Asharbyel is a relatively small galaxy located in the vicinity of the Silky Way. Barely a galaxy at all, Asharbyel has, owing to its isolation, produced very little stars over its lifetime. This leaves it with huge reserves of gas but almost no stars, rendering it almost invisible to the naked eye. Life can be very slow throughout most of the galaxy, and its 100,000 or so stars don't leave room for much to happen, which isn't aided by its incredibly low metallicity. The Agshu'urach, Asharbyel's largest polity, has recently made contact with Silky Way civilizations owing to the presence of the Bakran Wormhole.

Sarjul

Sarjul is a large irregular galaxy in vicinity of The Silky Way, approximately 900,000 light-years above the galactic north pole. Due to its high rate of star formation, it is substantially brighter than most galaxies its size. Sarjul is the in a chaotic starburst phase, producing huge numbers of stars in the wombs of stellar nurseries. This creates great numbers of open clusters, including the centrally located Terava Cluster.

Motherlode Galaxy

The Motherlode Galaxy is unique due to its astronomical density, almost 700,000 times that of the neighborhood of the Vernarca Nebula. This enables it to have over 200 million stars, half of which are within a sphere only 160 light-years in diameter. The galaxy's extraordinary density almost forces unlucky stars down the throat of the central black hole, making the galaxy a bright x-ray source and giving the black hole almost 20% of the total mass of the galaxy. Due to these factors, the Motherlode Galaxy is extremely unlikely to host any form of life.

Minor Satellites Table


Name	Stars	Type	Notes
Elat Galaxy	10 million	Irregular	Very distant
Paloa Galaxy	5 million	Dwarf Elliptical
Yuares I	2 million	Irregular	No one's entirely sure if these two are actually Silky Way satellites or just free-floating
Yuares II	1.5 million	Irregular
Oria Galaxy	900,000	Ultra-diffuse	Extremely sparse, almost half the size of the Silky Way itself but with only 900,000 stars.
Azertus Galaxy	750,000	Irregular
Verta Galaxy	600,000	Dwarf Elliptical
Asontes Cloud	400,000	Irregular
Trille Dwarf	350,000	Irregular	This is a particularly active galaxy, with many stars being formed.
Treita I	250,000	Dwarf Elliptical	This galaxy is not particularly interesting
Treita II	180,000	Irregular	Treita II contains a thriving interstellar ecosystem, and contains a strangely small number of large planets.
Treita III	140,000	Irregular	Very near Treita II, and is similarly populated by the space creatures.
Treita IV	100,000	Irregular	Smallest nondisputed satellite galaxy.
Yutze Overdensity	100,000	Intergalactic Overdensity	Disputed whether this is a satellite.

Globular Clusters

There are roughly three hundred globular clusters held within the gravitational influence of the Silky Way. The most notable among them are the Kolachio Cluster, the Net Cluster, the Cerlus Cluster, and the Web Cluster. There is also the Niblos Cluster, a hypercompact artificial cluster assembled and controlled by the primitive but powerful Minoma Imperium. The largest among them are generally theorized to originate from destroyed satellite galaxies akin to Majestic, such as the Web Cluster which uniquely has a central black hole, but most of them likely originated with the Silky Way itself or its satellites.

Kolachio Cluster

Among the most distant clusters bound to the Silky Way's gravitational effect, Kolachio was only discovered due to its close proximity to Asharbyel and therefore the Bakran Wormhole. Uniquely, the cluster is only detectable as an infrared source, due to its long settlement by the mysterious Trekkers, and likely originated much closer to the Silky Way before beginning its motion away towards its current position.

Web Cluster

The Web Cluster is the largest known globular cluster within the Silky Way, and orbits the galaxy within the Gap between the galactic core and ring. It is believed to be largely uninhabited, as no evidence of advanced civilization can be detected by the Tholian Array or any other such telescoping networks. It is believed to be the core of a former satellite galaxy, which was torn apart by the gravity of the Silky Way long ago.

Cerlus Cluster

Found high above the galactic plane in the nearly empty space of the halo, the Cerlus Cluster is large, uniquely planet-rich and highly populated, theorized to be due to the stellar engineering of an ancient civilization as detected by the Tholian Array. The Cerlus cluster is unusually rich in life for a region beyond a seed cluster, as panspermia from the initial lifebearing planet was very effective due to the close proximity of the star systems.

Net Cluster

The Net Cluster is a fairly standard globular cluster orbiting roughly 2,000 light-years above the Ervo Sector's Vernarca Nebula. The cluster is notable for its high quantity of blue straggler stars and great stellar density, and has recently been reached by unmanned probes from the Vernarca Nebula's civilizations.