The planet had been a subjovian with an atmosphere of hydrohelium and methane, a shell of ice and other frozen gases and a core, orbiting a bright star at a distance of a billion and a half kilometers;
an abnormal infall of cosmic material hastened the star's evolution, taking it off the main sequence;
the star swelled, cooled to red and destroyed its inner planets;
on the outer planets, atmospheres were lost, ice melted, oceans boiled and vapor escaped as the star pulsated;
the former subjovian is now an Earth-sized metallic and rock ball;
the removal of the top layers had released powerful tectonic forces, creating mountains, some now eroded, others still craggy;
between the mountains is a cratered stone plain;
the sun is immense and blue with a ruddy atmosphere;
another newly condensed star, as bright as a hundred Sols, impossible to view directly, passes close enough to show a disk;
the Cloud Universe is also overhead - an enormous sphere of light with a visible fringe of thousands of stars, red, gold, emerald and sapphire, fading and vanishing into the soft, pervasive glow of a nacreous luminosity, the titular "Starfog."
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think I can grasp what a stunning, even terrible beauty the Cloud Universe has. I did wonder how the Kirkasanters could have thought their CLUSTER, as it actually was, could have been in another universe (as I think they at first thought), another dimension, etc. Was the Cloud Universe so bright and crowded with stars that their astronomers failed to realize their home was in a CLUSTER of stars?
Sean
Sean,
Yes.
Paul.
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