Adventures In the Perseus Cluster

[Linwood]

I stumbled across an article on the Perseus Cluster - a collection of thousands of galaxies surrounding a black hole, with the space between stars filled with interstellar gases heated to millions of deg C.

It got me thinking - how would that influence life? Could life even exist in an environment with 2-10 KeV X-rays permeating the interstellar gas? (I’m guessing yes if the homeworlds have very strong magnetic fields but that’s just a guess). And would technologies like jump drive function well enough to allow interstellar travel?

Not sure where I’m going with this other than it seems like something fun to think about....

 

[phavoc]

The high radiation would produce some hardy life forms. Not sure how, or if, it would affect jump travel. Nebula would not affect jumps, but maybe with more debris inside of the region you might have stricter jump 'paths' that ships would have to follow to navigate between worlds. In a 'dirty' enough environment it could limit jumps, though the amount of debris would be staggering. Perhaps if the clouds had enough mass they could interfere with a jump, but that would be based upon the basic rules you set up to play in.

 

[paltrysum]

Only tangentially related, but I have considered the possibility of somehow transporting travellers to systems in either the Andromeda Galaxy or one of the Magellanic Clouds. Perhaps some kind of Ancients portal or something like that. High Guard describes a few TL 17+ drive types that are probably not quite powerful enough to jump the gap to those galaxies, but it was fun to play around with the concept and read a bit about what the stars might be like there.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I stumbled across an article on the Perseus Cluster - a collection of thousands of galaxies surrounding a black hole, with the space between stars filled with interstellar gases heated to millions of deg C.

It got me thinking - how would that influence life? Could life even exist in an environment with 2-10 KeV X-rays permeating the interstellar gas? (I’m guessing yes if the homeworlds have very strong magnetic fields but that’s just a guess). And would technologies like jump drive function well enough to allow interstellar travel?

Not sure where I’m going with this other than it seems like something fun to think about....

That's where you go for the TL 33 stuff before die-back happens in your sector, using T5 rules.

 

[steve98052]

Although the region of space may have a huge concentration of galaxies, it doesn't necessarily have an exceptional concentration of stars.

The concentration of galaxies in our local region of the universe is similar, obviously on a vastly different scale, to the concentration of gas molecules in room temperature air. Galaxies interact with each other routinely; our own galaxy has had lots of smaller galaxies pass through it, and in many cases the smaller galaxies have been shredded by our galaxy's gravitational field.

By contrast, stars are extremely sparse. If stars don't format together in a double or multiple star system or tight cluster, they'll probably never approach another star closely in the lifetime of the universe.