Notes: Universe Hierarchy

So, the first step to structuring a game based on the final frontier is to understand how the final frontier is structured. So, here are notes I took, trying to understand how the universe is structured.

Hierarchy of the Universe

Now , for the purpose of keeping this somewhat simple, we start on the lowest level of your common moon. The hierarchy goes as such.

Moon --> Planet --> Sun --> Galaxy --> Cluster --> Supercluster

Galactic centers are highly speculative, perhaps full of black holes or larger suns with huge gravitational pull. So stars in a galaxy relate to each other, but have no definitive center like a Sun is to a solar system.

Clusters are a bunch of galaxies that have a common attracting point, and are pretty much moving together through the Universe as it expands. The Milky Way galaxy is part of the "Local Cluster"Again, this common point of attraction is fairly vague, speculated to be dark matter. The cluster does not have a clear orbit like a solar system - as a matter of fact, in approximately 3 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will be crashing into the Andromeda galaxy. Good to know, huh?

Clusters can also be bound together into a Supercluster, as scientists have termed it, but it's not entirely certain that they work like the smaller clusters, so for the sake of this project, we'll ignore superclusters.

So what does this mean for our project? The current plan is to scan the internet and let site with a lot of links rise to be the Suns and maybe more could be changed. Since there is no definitive center for things like galaxies and clusters, having a site "represent it" would be puzzling. So perhaps sites that become Suns merely orbit around the "center" of the galaxy and perhaps group closer or further depending on their relationships - in which case, we may not need to go to a cluster level at all.


Another thought is looking at the spiral structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy has "arms" that spiral outwards from the galactic center. Could websites be organized into arms based on content or amount of links? it's something to think about, because then we wouldn't have to worry about the cluster level at all, and everything could be contained into one spiral galaxy form for exploration.

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