Astronavigation Data: Ilum system, 7G sector, Unknown regions
Suns: 1 (Asar)
Moons: 2
Day Length: 66 standard hours
Orbital Year Length: 301 standard days
Government: None
Terrain: Frozen lakes, mountains, ice steppes
Gravity: Standard
Major Imports: Nnone
Major Exports: None
Ilum is a small, obscure world located far out in the Unknown Regions. The fifth planet of the Ilum system, it orbits an exceedingly bright blue dwarf star called "Asar". Surveys of the system by ancient Jedi scouts show a handful of uninhabited, inhospitsable worlds that are either heavily irradiated, completely covered in ice, or both. The rest of the system is largely empty, with no asteroid belt and few navigation hazards. Due to its location in the Unknown Regions and its isolation from charted hyperspace lanes, nothing was known of the Ilum system until a wandering Jedi discovered it in the earliest days of the Republic.
Roughly equidistand from Asar and the system's cometary cloud, Ilum is the only world in the system that can support life. "Support" may be too strong a word for the relationship between Ilum and its flora and fauna, however. It is a large, terrestrial world orbited by two small moons and encircled by a wide set of rings made mostly of ice crystals. It is a land of broad continents, towering mountain ranges, and shallow seas locked in a perpetual ice age. Huge glaciers scour the planet's face, slowly grinding the land flat. Where the glaciers have passed, deep snows or sheets of ice dozens of meters thick entom the surface, making agriculture impossible. Ilum's few seas are shallow and broad, their waters choked with great floating ice mountains and thick sheets of drift ice. In addition to its frozen, snowbound landscape, Ilum has an atmosphere that is a near-constantly churning vortex of storms. High wind, sleet, thick snow, and freezing rain are to Ilum what gentle winds and soft rains are to Naboo.
Life, where it can thrive, does so primarly along Ilum's equatorial region. Here, at least, the temperatures are only in the double digits below freezing, which has allowed a small number of native plants and animals to evolve. A few eke out an existence on the planet's frozen surface, but most live either in the icy seas or deep beneath the ground in the uncounted thousands of kilometers of caverns and tunnels that worm through the planet's crust. Savage gorgodons, cunning asharl panthers, and the terrifying razhak call Ilum home, along with hardy species of small rodents, birds, and worms. Alongside these are tough plants and fungi adapted to sub-zero temperatures, many of them completely undocumented.
