Castro-Lux system

Overview

The Castro-Lux system (RS 8474-1353-8-10982885-1046) is a star system on the edge of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, around 1225 light years from Sol. It likely formed where it now is, due to its tiny age, only 14 million years old. It also contains 9 bodies with liquid water, a stupendously large amount for such a young system.

Two of them are O-class planets, three of them T-class planets and the remaining are all T-class moons. As a result, this system has attracted much attention among civilisations originally descended from T-Class worlds.

System

Castro: A small M7.5V red dwarf, a mere 7.9% the mass of Sol. (8 planets)

• Myach: A small desertic dwarf planet, and the most suitable for a colony not on the water-bearing planets of the system.
• Oblachno: A large ringed gas giant with easily differentiable bands, like Jupiter.
• Testament: A tidally locked, puffy waterworld and a testament to the speed of potential habitability. It has many cities on its surface and is nearly subject to permanent study, in one way or another.
• Ingentis: One of the largest planets in the entire system, Ingentis is a gas giant like Jupiter. It has one moon, and even more magnificent rings than Oblachno.
• Obliqua: A strange world, Obliqua is a T-class world but it is tilted on its side. It has thin rings, and resembles a miniature version of Uranus (when it was discovered).
• Glacipsum: A distant, very cold ice giant.
• Parvastra: Most likely the least significant of Castro's worlds, Parvastra is a tiny iceball.
• Eiar-Ver: A binary planet.
  • Eiar: A cool T-class world with many interesting features. It is warmer than normal due to tidal heating.
  • Ver: A desert world, and slightly warmer than Eiar.

Lux: A small L6.6 brown dwarf. (9 planets)

• Eostre: A tidally locked waterworld. Basically Testament, but orbiting Lux. (Lux b)
• Soranus: An angry-looking desert world that is surprisingly not tidally locked to Lux. (Lux c)
• 5 unnamed ice worlds.
• Imset: A shiny reflective snowball orbiting Lux at 0.69 AU. No jokes please. (Lux i)
• Khione: A completely frigid dwarf planet. It takes 4.39 years to orbit Lux, and is the coldest independently orbiting body of the entire system. (Lux j)

Elorus: A large gas giant with 26 moons. It orbits both Castro and Lux.

• Mote: A small T-class moon orbiting Elorus. It has seas of neon. (Elorus 4)

Ogian: A T-class planet orbiting both Castro and Lux.

Brigid: The largest gas giant and the furthest out, Brigid is only heated by tidal heating from its moons.

• Eurus, Nerthus and Mokosh (Brigid 5, 6, 7): 3 T-class moons orbiting Brigid.

Discovery

Discovered in 2621 by the URSS-funded Orion Young Fusor Survey Telescope (OY-FuST for short), this star system initially doesn't look special. From the stars' perspective, this is just a young binary consisting of a red dwarf and a brown dwarf. It wasn't until a multitude of planets had been discovered around Castro, the primary star that this system gained a bit of interest.

Testament (Castro d) could be habitable and had an absurdly low density, which sparked confusion among scientists. As a result, the URSS sent a few solar sail probes to investigate Castro's planetary system. What they found out shocked the entire scientific community - Testament was in fact an O-class planet. This was a huge surprise, considering the very, very young age of the system. What surprised scientists even more was that both Obliqua and Eiar, two planets in the Castro system, were Titan analogues! This shocked most of the scientific community, forcing them to slightly re-write some of their planetary formation and cooling models.

Further exploration

The probes were next directed to Lux, the brown dwarf of this system. In fact, the system around Lux seemed like a normal brown dwarf system. But again, this system is young, so it's a slight surprise that Eostre managed to cool down so quickly to become an O-class world.

But the most surprise came from the outer 3 planets. Somehow, there were 5 T-class worlds here! And all of them were below -235 degrees Celsius. Such a young system shouldn't have so many cold worlds.

WIP