Yx α

Yx

Yx α was a superplanet that orbited the supermassive black hole Yx at the core of the Andromeda galaxy. One year on Yx was 100,000 Earth years, as it made the rapid yet incredibly slow journey around its 'star'. The planet, notably, had a striking visual appearance. With an axial tilt of 82 degrees, Yx α's 'North' pole was always facing inward, toward the supermassive black hole. Over time, the black hole pulled certain heavier elements toward the northern hemisphere, homogenizing the atmospheric bands over millions of years, resulting in the colorful display pictured to the right.

Yx Alpha, twice as large as Jupiter, was classified as an Hycean planet, due to its mixture of sub and superterranean oceans, small landmasses in the sky and sea, and violent, thick, and opposing atmospheric layers, especially its northern hemisphere.

It was not uncommon for 'Warm' fronts (upwards of 90+ Celsius), usually west-tearing jetstreams charged with regurgitated solar particles, to collide in thunderous, ear-shattering explosions, with 'Cold' fronts, (reaching as low as -150 Celsius) east or north meandering thick masses of ice and salt-bearing clouds which rained down saltwater crystals across the oceans and islands of Yx α. Sometimes, cold fronts became so chilling that they actually began freezing entire cloud stripes in the planet's atmosphere, forming massive, planet-encompassing rings of salt ice which became deadly spinning sky glaciers, eventually breaking apart and smashing back down to the planet's surface to begin again.

A day on Yx α could last anywhere from 8 to 15 hours, depending on the fluctuations of nearby graviational bodies, as well as the percentage of the atmosphere which was frozen at any given point in time.

View from the surface of the planet, near the equator.

The planet retained a somewhat amorphous composition due to its proximity to Yx and other black holes, neutron stars, and pulsars in its neighborhood. The violent gravitational tug-of-war between bodies occassionally tore bits of Yx α off and thrust them out into the cosmos, but these elements would be replaced by a smattering of stray star dust not digested by Yx, or in fact, as was often the case, these materials would find their way back down to Yx.

Yx α was the homeworld of the Combine Emperor Xos. In 42 million BB, an unknown event occurred on Yx α, referred to in Combine history books as the 'Great Bleaching', which resulted in the deaths of all of its native species aside from one individual- a Yxian humanoid who would come to be known as Xos.