Nugua
(Planet Kepler-70c)
Nugua is the second planet orbiting around the star Kepler-70, located roughly 3,800 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. The star is a blue subdwarf, the remnants of a collapsed red giant. All assessments of this planet predicted a near zero probability of organic life. As a result, when Maximillion "Million" Green found that the Kenji Protocol ranked it as having a high probability of technological development, both he and his advisor, Tianli Andrade, assumed that it was just an error. Only after persistent checking and rechecking of the numbers, Green was able to convince Tianli to use his status as the most famous xenobiologist of all time to put together a long-shot mission to go out to the planet and see what was there.
Ecosystem
Nugua began, several hundred million years ago, as a gas giant planet orbiting Kepler-70, a main sequence star. When Kepler-70 grew to a red giant it engulfed the planet and boiled away all of its gas and atmosphere, leaving only a small, hard, metallic core. The planet that remains has no atmosphere, no water, and no organic material whatsoever. The surface is scarred with craters, although collisions are now rare because the expansion and collapse of the planet's star have cleared the local area of spatial debris. Kepler-70 has since contracted and become a blue subdwarf, so Nugua's orbit no longer falls beneath the star's surface. Nugua is close enough, however, to make the star blindingly bright and white in the sky. Nugua speeds around its orbit fast enough to circle the star three times in one Earth day, casting shadows on the surface of the planet that never stop moving.Notability
An intelligent indigenous species ("Nuguans"), with a rich and complex civilization, were discovered when the Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None crash-landed with its two-person crew in the year 312 GE.Planetary Data
Planet Type
Metallic Dwarf Planet
Mass (vs Earth)
0.81x
Radius (vs Earth)
0.67x
Orbital Period (Earth days)
0.343
Assessed P(life)
0.13
Assessed P(tech)
0.78
First Contact Data
Contact Year
312 GE
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