Characters
Dr. Sondra Berghoff: A researcher at the Gravitics Research Station who assists Larry Chao in his attempts to prove his findings in artificial gravity. Without authorization, she reconfigures a routine experiment with Larry's assistance to boost the power of the gravity signal a thousandfold, resulting in the accidental awakening of the charonian Observer, also known as the Lunar Wheel.
Wolf Bernhardt: Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth, who becomes the head of the UN Directorate of Spatial Investigation after the Big Jump.
Larry O'Shawnessy Chao: A young junior researcher at the Gravitics Research Station on Pluto who discovers a way to concentrate and amplify the power of an existing source of gravity. Unfortunately, in a later attempt to prove his claims, he directs a modulated gravity beam at Earth, triggering its capture by the slumbering Observer buried deep within the moon.
Dr. Gerald MacDougal: Husband to Marcia MacDougal. A born-again Canadian exobiologist, Gerald was transported to the Multisystem along with the Earth.
Dr. Marcia MacDougal: Wife to Gerald MacDougal. Born in Tycho Purple Penal, she was declared a refugee and escaped the Naked Purple lifestyle when the fire department burned her parents' house. A planetary engineer at VISOR, Marcia observed Earth's disappearance and later cracked Charonian communications via the Arecibo method.
Dr. Hiram McGillicutty: The abrasive head physicist at VISOR. Notorious for his lack of couth when dealing with other people, he is brilliant and meticulous in gathering data, even if he tends to come to the wrong conclusions.
Dr. Simon Raphael: Embittered by years of failed research into gravity manipulation, Raphael is the director of the Gravitics Research Station. He initially dismisses Larry Chao's test results as a fabrication in attempt to keep the station open, and attempts to shut down further research into the so-called Chao Effect. Following the apparent destruction of Earth, he opens the station's facilities to Larry in order to try to undo what he has done, and later comes to trust and support the young scientist in his actions.
Dianne Steiger: Pilot of the cargo tug Pack Rat, Dianne is later appointed the captain of the Terra Nova following the Big Jump.
Dr. Jane Webling: The aging Director of Science at the Gravitics Research Station.
Coyote Westlake: A solo asteroid miner who is inadvertently transported to Mars when she lands on a Charonian G-point disguised as an asteroid.
Locations
The Multisystem
The Multisystem is a huge artificial stellar system presided over by a Charonian Dyson Sphere where Earth was taken after the Big Jump. It is host to at least eight G-class stars and dozens of Earth-like planets, all stolen from their respective solar systems in the same manner as the Earth and carefully held in their orbits with artificial gravity. The planets are shepherded by a large number of Charonian COREs which destroy any potential threat to the life-bearing planets through direct physical impact, including human spacecraft.
NaPurHab: The Naked Purple Habitat, owned and operated by the radical Naked Purple social movement, was brought along in the Big Jump and managed to survive the transition by orbiting around the Moonpoint black hole. Against their own philosophy, the residents of the habitat cooperated with the people of Earth, relaying messages through the Saint Anthony to the Solar System before the probe's final destruction by a CORE.
Saint Anthony: A probe sent through the wormhole connecting the Solar System to the Multisystem, the Saint Anthony was used to relay messages and scientific data across the void of space prior to its destruction by a CORE.
Terra Nova: Built by the United Nations and mothballed as a result of the K-crash, this ship was meant to explore another star system after a flight lasting for generations. Following the Big Jump, it was recommissioned with Dianne Steiger as the captain and Gerald MacDougal as the chief science officer. The Directorate of Spatial Investigation, formulated to investigate the cause and implications of the Big Jump, ordered the Terra Nova to investigate the Dyson Sphere, but soon after its launch it became apparent that this would be impossible due to the marauding COREs in the multisystem. Realizing that humanity had few spaceborne resources left after the Big Jump, the captain decided that the Terra Nova would not return to Earth, instead waiting a safe distance from the attack range of the COREs for the time that it would be of use to Earth.
The Solar System
The Belt Community: Being as the asteroid belt is ungovernably large, the Belt community consists of widely spread independent and corporate mining operations, with Ceres at its core as the primary trading post. Although conventional law enforcement throughout the belt is impossible, Ceres itself is governed under the just (if not heavy-handed) watch of the Autocrat. Once plagued by rock wars (vicious skirmishes which typically arose due to disputes over mining rights), the death penalty has been frequently employed to keep the population in check. Although the secrets of the Autocrat are closely guarded, the Belt Community has developed a device called the Core cracker, and quite seriously offered to blow up the planet Mercury both to create a second asteroid belt and assist VISOR in the terraforming of Venus.
Gravitics Research Station: Control center for the Ring of Charon, the largest particle accelerator ever built. Slated to be mothballed by the UN following the K-crash after years of unsuccessful experimentation, a perfectly timed breakthrough by Larry Chao held off the shutdown of the facility. Located on Pluto, this was where human experiments in gravity control resulted in the accidental awakening of the Lunar Ring and the theft of Earth. The Ring was a crucial tool in the later study of Charonians and eventually to fight against them.
Tycho Purple Penal: Once a UN-sanctioned prison colony buried under Tycho Crater on the moon, this converted penitentiary was declared a sovereign republic in order to release the UN of its responsibility to maintain it. Controlled by former inmates, the colony was taken under the influence of the radical Naked Purple social movement, and subsequently renamed Tycho Purple Penal. Standing restrictions on immigration forbade any resident from leaving the colony, but Marcia MacDougal was able to overcome this obstacle when she was declared a refugee following the burning of her parents' house.
VISOR: Venus Initial Station for Operational Research, the human research facility built to study possible methods of terraforming the world. Following notification of Larry Chao's gravity experiment, all of the facility's instruments were focused on Earth at the time of the Big Jump. Observations made by several scientists on VISOR were later crucial to human attempts to understand and combat the Charonian invaders.
An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to dwarf planets almost 1000 km in diameter; they are metallic or rocky bodies with no atmosphere.
A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a young protostar orbited by a protoplanetary disk. Planets grow in this disk by the gradual accumulation of material driven by gravity, a process called accretion. At least eight planets exist in the Solar System: the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets each rotate around an axis tilted with respect to its orbital pole. All of them possess an atmosphere, even Mercury, and some share such features as ice caps, seasons, volcanism, hurricanes, tectonics, and even hydrology. Apart from Venus and Mars, the Solar System planets generate magnetic fields, and all except Venus and Mercury have natural satellites. The giant planets bear planetary rings, the most prominent being those of Saturn.
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority (99.86%) of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in the planet Jupiter. The four inner system planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—are terrestrial planets, being composed primarily of rock and metal. The four giant planets of the outer system are substantially larger and more massive than the terrestrials. The two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the next two, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants, being composed mostly of volatile substances with relatively high melting points compared with hydrogen and helium, such as water, ammonia, and methane. All eight planets have nearly circular orbits that lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, called the ecliptic.
Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was the first object discovered in the Kuiper belt and remains the largest known body in that area. After Pluto was discovered in 1930, it was declared the ninth planet from the Sun. However, beginning in the 1990s, its status as a planet was questioned following the discovery of several objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc, including the dwarf planet Eris, leading the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 to define the term planet formally—excluding Pluto and reclassifying it as a dwarf planet.
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called asteroids or minor planets. This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids.
A natural satellite is, in the most common usage, an astronomical body that orbits a planet, dwarf planet, or small Solar System body. Natural satellites are often colloquially referred to as moons, a derivation from the Moon of Earth.
The following is a timeline of Solar System astronomy.
Tycho is a prominent lunar impact crater located in the southern lunar highlands, named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). It is estimated to be 108 million years old.
A space habitat is a more advanced form of living quarters than a space station or habitation module, in that it is intended as a permanent settlement or green habitat rather than as a simple way-station or other specialized facility. No space habitat has been constructed yet, but many design concepts, with varying degrees of realism, have come both from engineers and from science-fiction authors.
A minor-planet moon is an astronomical object that orbits a minor planet as its natural satellite. As of January 2022, there are 457 minor planets known or suspected to have moons. Discoveries of minor-planet moons are important because the determination of their orbits provides estimates on the mass and density of the primary, allowing insights of their physical properties that is generally not otherwise possible.
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow, which became a mission to 486958 Arrokoth. It is the fifth space probe to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the Solar System.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to astronomy:
Asteroids, including those in the asteroid belt have been suggested as a possible site of human colonization. Some of the driving forces behind this effort to colonize asteroids include the survival of humanity, as well as economic incentives associated with asteroid mining. The process of colonizing asteroids does have many obstacles that must be overcome for human habitation, including transportation distance, lack of gravity, temperature, radiation, and psychological issues.
The formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and other small Solar System bodies formed.
A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit of the Sun, smaller than any of the eight classical planets but still a world in its own right. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto. The interest of dwarf planets to planetary geologists is that since they are possibly differentiated and geologically active bodies, they may display planetary geology, an expectation that was borne out by the Dawn mission to Ceres and the New Horizons mission to Pluto in 2015.
The fictional portrayal of the Solar System has often included planets, moons, and other celestial objects which do not actually exist in reality. Some of these objects were, at one time, seriously considered as hypothetical planets which were either thought to have been observed, or were hypothesized to be orbiting the Sun in order to explain certain celestial phenomena. Often such objects continued to be used in literature long after the hypotheses upon which they were based had been abandoned.
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth's "cosmic neighborhood". This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets, asteroids, and dust.
A Bishop Ring is a type of hypothetical rotating space habitat originally proposed in 1997 by Forrest Bishop of the Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering. The concept is a smaller scale version of the Banks Orbital, which itself is a smaller version of the Niven ring. Like other space habitat designs, the Bishop Ring would spin to produce artificial gravity by way of centrifugal force. The design differs from the classical designs produced in the 1970s by Gerard K. O'Neill and NASA in that it would use carbon nanotubes instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would be approximately 1,000 km (620 mi) in radius and 500 km (310 mi) in width, containing 3 million square kilometers of living space, comparable to the area of Argentina or India.
Leviathan Wakes is a science fiction novel by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of American writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. It is the first book in the Expanse series, followed by Caliban's War (2012), Abaddon's Gate (2013) and six other novels. Leviathan Wakes was nominated for the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The novel was adapted for television in 2015 as the first season-and-a-half of The Expanse by Syfy. Five short stories that take place before, during, or after Leviathan Wakes were published between 2011 and 2019.
The geology of Charon are the characteristics of the surface, crust, and interior of Pluto's moon Charon. Charon's diameter is 1,208 km (751 mi)—just over half that of Pluto. Charon is sufficiently massive to have collapsed into a spheroid under its own gravity.
