Dead Star

Prologue - The Magellanic HeresiesFragments recovered from the journal of Semion Achybe, astrophysicist of the deep space exploratory vessel Magellanic Cloud, as reassembled and translated by Ondo Ynwa Lagan from discoveries made on the (now extinct) planet Maes Far. Warning: These fragments form part of the Magellanic Heresies as proscribed by Concordance. Ownership or propagation of these documents is considered an act of extreme heresy against Omn. Read or distribute at your own risk. …and while triple sun systems aren't rare in the galaxy, this one was intriguing given the regularity of the three stars' movements around each other. The patterns of their orbits are complex – but there definitely are patterns. In most ternary systems, the motions of the stellar bodies are so unpredictable over time that they are essentially chaotic. It was the curiously clock-like regularity of the stellar trajectories we observed in this system that persuaded us to divert the Magellanic Cloud from its itinerary to visit the system in the first place… …while the highly regular movements of the suns are intriguing, it is the rocky bodies in the system – both the planets and their satellites – that have proved to be more fascinating. At this point in time, we have no good explanations for the orbital movements observed. The planetary moons, in particular, do not conform to any of the predictions made by our computational models; their orbits simply should not be stable or regular. Each moon should have spiralled down onto a planetary collision trajectory long ago in galactic history. Setting aside some of the wilder speculations among the crew, it is clear that our models must be wrong. Something is going on in this system that we do not understand…