A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09
There is an old, old song from Earth...
... that no one in my entire family circle can ever sing right now because of the evacuation of Bhtitgo 3, and how the way some of its native creatures behaved gave a warning that a human child on the planet and my uncle, Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, worked out in the nick of time.
The child, now a science officer in the fleet and directly mentored by my uncle, noticed something interesting ... there was a meteor shower that was going the wrong way in the atmosphere. Bhtitgo 3 has three regular meteor showers, but this was a fourth, distinct from all of them, and they were not falling. They were rising. She made several nights of videos, and her father eventually noticed and passed those videos to the fleet.
But this was far from Earth, on a frontier, and there were thought to be more pressing issues that fleet personnel had to deal with ... so it was quite a long time before any captain thought deeply about the fact that if there were no meteor showers available to create that shower, then something else had to be going on. But he didn't have time -- a whole conflict situation was going on -- so he bounced it up upward, and the person that ended up getting it on his desk was my uncle, Admiral Banneker-Jackson.
Uncle Benjamin looked at the available surface footage -- the supposed meteors were actually more like rockets, leaving the surface by the thousands per night, and all emanating from the planet's seismically and geothermically active areas of the planet, all over the planet. Now even presuming an eruption of any power, particles getting to escape velocity from the force of an explosion is unthinkable on a planet with near the gravity of Earth. It is not to say that it cannot happen, but if it did, everyone on the planet would know, and there was no geological evidence of any cataclysm of that size.
However, it would not take a cataclysm of that size from every corner of the planet to be a problem, and this started Uncle Benjamin digging deeply into the geological findings about the planet. There were some anomalies, but nothing conclusive that would yield to immediate understanding.
So then, Uncle Benjamin went back to studying the "rising stars" themselves ... their spectrogram said they were silicon-based, and their behavior -- one would rise through the hole in the atmosphere blasted by the one in front of it ... suggested they were sentient, another rare example of silicon-based life.
Then he realized: that life was trying to communicate, and literally grew a crystal face to try to get humanity's attention. More and more of the rising stars, in later footage, had a clear face.
Uncle Benjamin is one of those people who knows that humans aren't telepathic, but also lives like that doesn't apply to him, because it doesn't. All he heard was RUN, and so he ordered the nearest ship with a Vulcan officer on board to to deploy and do the telepathic work, and that ship encountered several million of the creatures, cooled down and hovering around Bhtitgo 10. That by itself was telling, but they told it all.
Same pure fractal in a different palette
The rising stars explained telepathically that every ten generations in their time, about 5,000 years in our time, Bhtitgo 3 essentially pops like popcorn as the pressures in its core go out of control, and then gravity pulls it back together. That explained the anomalies the original surveyors had found and Uncle Benjamin had seen, and why they could not be explained: Bhtitgo 3 is the first planet documented that has what is now called an "explosory life cycle." The rising stars explained that they carried seeds and flora and fauna with them, and would re-settle the planet again after it cooled down.
Needless to say, the fleet invested the resources to rapidly evacuate Bhtitgo 3, and the margin for error ended up being five years -- and somewhere I have a freeze frame of the planet literally turning inside out like popcorn. To this day, one can observe gravity gathering it all back in again. These observations have helped humanity make better decisions about settling planets and get a better understanding about why other space-going civilizations had also not settled certain planets. It turns out that "explosory life cycle" planets, though not common, are definitely a thing in the galaxy to be recognized and avoided!
Author's Note: it turns out that Seti Alpha 6 is one of these types of planets, and the explosion of it just after the events of "Space Seed" in Star Trek: TOS is what sets up the events of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In essence, I worked backwards from there to explain these rising stars ... so in theory, Cousin J.T. in the M.A. Kirk Universe can actually avoid Admiral Kirk finding out the hard way that Seti Alpha 5 needs to be evacuated ... but then again, he might also miss the memo, too ... parallel universes are so interesting!