Spatial Anomalies of the Shackleton Expanse

The Shackleton Expanse is a vast volume of space located in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, and as such, contains tens of millions of star systems and billions of worlds. Located on the far anti-spinward side of the Romulan Empire, the Expanse has had limited exploration by both the Empire and the Federation due to dangerous gravimetric shear, navigational hazards, and distorted space-time. With the development of more robust warp systems, along with other technologies, exploration of the Shackleton Expanse has quickly become a higher priority for Starfleet. This overview details some of the spatial and astronomical features noted within the Expanse.

Shackleton Pinwheel

Located on the far side of the Expanse, the Shackleton Pinwheel is a phenomenon that has yet to be studied in detail due to its distance from the station. The Pinwheel itself can be seen by the naked eye from a dozen lightyears away. It resembles its name, a multi-armed spiral of red and orange ionized hydrogen and helium, stretching nearly a light-year in diameter before the gases cool and dim. At the center of this Pinwheel are two red giant stars circling close enough to each other that their photospheres nearly merge as the gasses are ripped away by the gravitational forces of the other and flung outward to form the spiral arms surrounding them. The two central stars have had their interiors churned up, allowing fresh hydrogen to enter their core regions and giving these stars a longer life span, but also causing nova events that can be seen lighting up the surrounding pinwheel for years afterward from its light echo as well as further ionization. Orbiting these two stars in eccentric and highly inclined orbits are five gas giants ranging in mass from five to twenty times that of Jupiter in the Sol system, each with numerous moons that have yet to be surveyed. Currently, Starfleet believes these planets to be the remains of the planetary system that once circled these stars when they were on the main sequence. Now they gather ejected stellar gases and cut paths through the ejecta, giving the arms of the Shackleton Pinwheel intricate grooves and whorls.

The Endurance Divide

The Endurance Divide is a massive complex of interstellar dust, cold gases, and brown dwarf stars. Located along the Federation border with the Expanse, the Divide wraps around the spinward edges of the Expanse like a blanket, preventing accurate sensor scans and increasing the amount of power needed for warp systems to maintain a stable subspace bubble. Ranging between one and three light years thick, current theories suggest that the Divide is the remnant gas and debris from the supernovas that formed the Washboard Triplets. While passing through the Divide and into the Expanse proper, Starfleet recommends vessels to drop to low warp speeds to reduce wear on the subspace coils and to maintain a detailed sensor sweep for dangerous obstacles or large conglomerations of dust and gas that may tax the ability of the primary deflector array to protect the vessel from harm. Inside the Divide, the skies are dimmed by the high concentrations of dust, and often the brightest stars are the nearby brown dwarf star systems that are accompanied by few icy dark worlds. While devoid of Class-M worlds, the Divides’ strange environment is host to a complex ecosystem of space-borne lifeforms ranging from single-celled chemosynthetic organisms feasting on ammonia ices, to the five-hundred meter wide wingspan of the nimrod schooner, an asexually reproducing animal resembling a cross between a solar sail vessel and a Terran woodlouse.

The Washboard

The entire volume of the Shackleton Expanse has strange gravimetric distortions and ripples in space-time that can be a danger to vessels traveling at warp speeds. The overall phenomenon is known as “The Washboard.” Near the edges of the Expanse, vessels at warp have their warp field compressed and expanded as space-time distorts around the vessel, making the crew feel as though the ship was accelerating and decelerating, or swaying from side to side. This effect is so pronounced that warp systems from the 23rd century and earlier were prevented from operating in all but the furthest reaches of the Expanse, damage often occurring to the warp systems of the vessels. This restricted most exploration of the area until the 2360s. Even with modern warp systems capable of adapting to the subspace and gravimetric distortions, this effect can still be felt at high warp velocities, and becomes stronger the closer a vessel comes to the Washboard Triplets, the cause of this effect. One of the first Federation starships to enter the Shackleton Expanse was U.S.S. Umbra, a Miranda-class vessel, in 2308. With the scale and danger of the Washboard then unknown, Umbra did not slow its warp velocity when it detected a Class-M world. Logs show that as the vessel turned toward the system, it began cutting against the gravimetric shear and suffered immediate catastrophic damage to its warp nacelles. The vessel dropped out of warp half a light-year from the planet, with most of its power systems burnt out. After drifting under low impulse power for 1.5 standard years, the survivors of Umbra made planetfall on the world they called Finally, unwillingly becoming the first Federation colonists in the Expanse. Finally is used as a waypoint and for shore leave, the decedents of Umbra having built a small Starfleet outpost on the shores of Lake Here’s Fine.

The Washboard Triplets

The cause of the majority of strange subspace distortions and gravimetric waves that have made exploration of the Shackleton Expanse fraught with danger are the Washboard Triplets. This strange system consists of three massive white dwarf stars that orbit around each other in a complex dance. Few probes to the Triplets have been launched due to the extreme spacetime distortions caused by frame dragging within 10 light-days, but certain data has made the Triplets a high priority for the Federation Science Council. Scans show that each of the white dwarf stars are exactly the same mass, down to the error range housed within the probes’ sensors. While this similarity in mass would be sufficient to interest the Council, these same scans show that each of the white dwarfs mass enough to overwhelm the ability for electron degeneracy pressure to prevent the collapse of the dwarf into a neutron star. In the volume surrounding the Triplets, there is a high density of gaseous tritanium, particulate dilithium, and complex carbon chains. All of this evidence points to one of the many ancient civilizations of the Galaxy engineering this system, for reasons unknown. Starfleet currently recommends any expedition starships to maintain at least a five light-year distance from the Triplets. Plans are underway for a detailed survey of the system and the construction of a monitoring buoy for gravimetric and subspace waves, along with the planned construction of a heavily-modified Intrepid-class vessel capable of an even wider angle of pitch for its warp nacelles.

The Ember Sector

Found approximately 50 light-years coreward and trailing from the Triplets, the Ember Sector is a fascinating volume of space. Inside its loose borders are approximately 150 small, high metallicity, red main sequence stars ranging in temperature and mass from M7 to M3. Spectrographic analysis of the stars, and brief geological surveys of six planetary systems, show that all of the stars began their lives approximately 3.5 billion years ago and must have formed from a single nebulae, as the metal concentrations in the stars are all very similar. Additionally, these stars all have trajectories that have kept them closely entangled with each other.

With the limited probe surveys done in the Ember Sector, Starfleet has seen an astonishing half of systems containing at least one Class L, M, or O world. The statistical likelihood of this occurring is remote at best, and Starfleet plans to assign multiple exploratory starships to make astronomical, geological, and biological surveys of the entire Ember Sector within the next 10 years. While the cool red stars give the impression that they are not dangerous, many of the stars in the Ember Sector flare on a semi-regular basis. Crews assigned to away teams on future missions will have to undergo radiation triage training and practice survival techniques in planetary environments containing ionizing radiation.

T'Kal Nursery

Named after the Vulcan astrographer who performed the first long range survey of the region, the T’Kal Nursery is the largest stellar nursery in the Shackleton Expanse. The Nursery spans a volume approximately eight light-years in diameter and contains upward of 200 young stars. Only the outer regions of the nebula have been properly surveyed at this time, but Starfleet plans to assign at least one vessel to chart the protostars shrouded by the thick clouds of ionized gas.

Like most nebulae, the Nursery consists of a homogenous mix of gases and dust, and, along the rimward regions of this body, the differences in composition primarily are of double ionized oxygen that results in a brightly glowing green cloud interrupted by streamers of red gases made up of lower simple ionized oxygen and hydrogen. This whole area is ionized due to the presence of a bright blue main sequence star that has blown away the curtain of gases around it with its powerful solar winds.

Gossamer Rings of Pi-Latka

Long-range scans of this orange main sequence star showed strange spectral lines suggesting a dense Oort cloud, a shell of icy bodies found around most star systems. What was discovered was far from a typical Oort cloud as the star had rings of icy particles stretching from the ice line, where temperatures around a star allow ice to exist, out to a distance of 15 AU. The system is named Pi-Latka after a winged deity representing beauty from the Andorian P’Ea faith during Andoria’s Iron Age.

Inside these rings are small minor worlds ranging from a few kilometers to several hundred kilometers in diameter, acting like shepherd moons of ringed gas giants. Surveys completed of the outermost shepherd world, Ramble, have discovered an ecosystem of single and small multi-cellular life forms living in the ice. Dating radioactive elements on Ramble and some of the outer rings has suggested that the rings are between 200 and 500 thousand years old. There have been many theories put forward to explain the catastrophe that must have occurred in the Pi-Latka system, but none so far have been proven as more likely than others. Starfleet’s Corps of Engineers is currently designing a heavily shielded observational outpost to be built on Ramble for use by civilian and Starfleet scientists wishing to delve into the secrets of this system’s Gossamer Rings.