Nico didn't look up from her data tablet as she answered Max's concerns about what was going on with this region of space.
"Right? I saw something while we waited that totally didn't make sense. The planet is roughly two billion years old. But the star it circles appears to be under two million years old, and the particles around the system support that. If the star was older, its gravitational force would have pulled the smaller particles and lumps of rock into more planetoids, but they're still mostly floating freely all over the place."
How had that not occurred to Max? This might be another region of the universe, but the rules of Galactic Formation should still be the same here. The Arisen said that the star systems were destroyed, but that didn't mean nothing survived. The planets could have floated in the remains of their former homes until the stars began to reform or were forcibly reformed by one of the species involved.