Changed Plans
25 Nov 2020Eris
Pilot's Log: CMDR Eris, aboard the Nyx.25 Nov 3306 - 23:49
Well... today has been interesting.
Since I thought we would be staying in Colonia longer than we did, I went and acquired an Eagle - which I named Thetis - and outfitted it to do some basic bounty hunting, nothing too fancy. I did a little engineering with what I had, and set off to carry out a contract or two. To be fair, I did. I killed a few pirates, cashed in a few bounties, completed a contract, and made a few hundred thousand more credits than I spent on the ship, so net gain. Brilliant.
When I arrived back in Jaques though I got a message from Packie saying there's been a change of plans. One of his old friends told him about there being rumours of a mostly unexplored sector of Giant, Supergiant, and Wolf-Rayet Stars directly up from Colonia, along with the occasional Herbigs Star. So Packie said that he wanted to go check these things out immediately. So... we set off.
We did find a few interesting things on the way out, including an already discovered Herbigs Star, and an undiscovered Earthlike, but that's not the unusual thing. What was unusual was the Wolf-Rayets we found about 3000 ly above Colonia. They were already discovered, but I don't think the previous discoverer noticed that something was odd about them.
Now, I'm not an expert, but all of the Wolf-Rayets were far too young. Wolf-Rayets are primarily a variant of O Class stars at the end of their lifecycle right? So naturally you'd assume them to be young, in the range of a few tens of millions of years because O Classes really don't last long. Thing is, we found about 4 Wolf-Rayets in close proximity to each other, and they were all less than 1 Million years old. Now considering that these stars were absolutely nowhere near anywhere they could even form - we were outside the galactic dust cloud at this point - that's just not possible. Those stars simply cannot be there and be that young. So either something was off with our sensors, or there's something odd about that sector.
Take Dryu Auf AA-A h100 A for example; the star was 62.7266 solar masses, and 5 solar radii, now that's already odd because the star is ridiculously dense, but I don't know if that's normal for Wolf-Rayets. But the thing was registered as less than 1 million years old and it's companion star - Dryu Auf AA-A h100 B, sn O class - was also less than 1 million years old. But that's not even the strangest part about the sector! There was a star - Dryu Auf AA-A h193 A - that on our sensors and charts was logged as a Class B8 IVb before we jumped there, meaning it was supposed to be a low-temperature Class B Sub-giant.
That classification is wrong. The star is a Class B, sure, and it's a very cold one, sure, but it is absolutely not a sub-giant. The star had 49.7813 solar masses, and a whopping 421.1684 solar radii. That is not a bloody sub-giant. But do you know what makes this even stranger? THE STAR WAS ALSO REGISTERED AS LESS THAN A MILLION YEARS OLD! This is not possible.
As soon as I hand my data in, I might send a copy to whoever would be an expert on this. Maybe they'll investigate further.
For now though, I need to rest. At least I managed to buy a few kegs of cider from Jaques Station before I left...