Space

still a WIP... a big one...

Learn about where in the universe phonies and company live.

Stars

Somewhere in the universe lies a star by the name of Confibula with a little halo of stardust surrounding it. However, under closer inspection, the system is actually five stars in a trenchcoat, a quintuple star system (not too dissimilar from Gemini's Castor) made of pairs of stars which orbit other pairs of stars.

Both stars in the A pair orbit a point between their masses, and both stars in the B pair orbit a point between their masses. Both of these points-between-masses (which are scientifically known as barycenters) then orbit a point between their own masses, a delicate stellar dance through the cosmos. Some intriguing facts about each star:

  • Confibula Aa was a main sequence star who aged, expanded into a red giant and shed its layers in a planetary nebula known as the Bleeding Heart nebula. It is now a white dwarf.
  • Confibula Ab still orbits around its now-mostly-dead partner. The new matter shed from Aa has been gravitationally attracted to Ab as it is being ejected from it, and it's grown from a red dwarf to a main sequence star. Because it's still incorporating new mass into it, it has an accretion disc.
  • Confibula Ba is the star which the phony planet orbits around. There's not much special about it, it's a main sequence star with no distinct features other than harboring life around it.
  • Confibula Bb is a white main sequence star with a close mass to its partner. Their barycenter is roughly in the middle of the distance between them and they have the same orbital periods, so that they don't collide with one another. It's rumored that life is also harbored on one of its planets.
  • Confibula Bc is a brown dwarf only barely more massive than a gas giant. It doesn't participate in the barycentric shenanigans Ba and Bb are part of, and it just orbits Bb like a normal planet would. Its other name is Confibula Bbb for this behavior.

The orbits of all these stars makes things quite convoluted. Diagram not to scale even in the slightest.

This planet

The planet phonies specifically live on is called Confibula ba-d which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. It's the third planet from the star, with Confibula ba-b and Confibula ba-c being closer to it and Confibula ba-e on the outside. Each planet in the star system appears to be of a totally different composition with ba-b being mostly iron, ba-c being mostly carbon, ba-d being mostly silicate and ba-e mostly ice.

Confibula ba-d is a small terrestrial planet similar to Earth. It also has a ring system, and an icy moon that frequently delivers material to the rings through geysers. The planet also has an atmosphere deceptively low in oxygen despite all the life that lives on it. The temperature is overall lower than Earth's, but all of the critters that live on the planet have their own adaptations to this.

When Confibulan creatures look into the sky, they see this ring system from almost anywhere on the planet, as well as their moon and the other member of the star system. They see Confibula Bb as a the brightest star in the sky and the A pair as a faint blob of color in the night sky with a dim red star at the bottom of it.