Universe

The cosmos came into being with the Big Bang, an event occurring before 13,000,000,000 BBY. Inhabitants of the galaxy estimated their home took shape in that year from cosmic remnants. A massive aggregation of gas and dust underwent gravitic compression, leading to the formation of a disk spanning one hundred thousand light-years, with a black hole at its core, around which its contents orbited. The galaxy housed roughly four hundred billion stars. Several satellite galaxies also arose, beginning their orbits around the primary galaxy.

Other galaxies also came into being. In another galaxy, star systems emerged, and on one planet, later known as Yuuzhan'tar, the Yuuzhan Vong civilization, along with countless other sentient species, would evolve.

Despite limited supporting evidence, certain researchers, such as Dr. Insmot Bowen, speculated that the Celestials might have engineered the entire cosmos.

The Force, a fundamental energy, held the cosmos together, permeating and uniting all things within it. It interacted with life in the galaxy through microscopic, semi-sentient organisms called midi-chlorians. For a considerable time, the Force remained a philosophical subject, an abstract concept explored independently by various groups throughout the galaxy, whose technology was not advanced enough for collaborative study. Their initial understanding of the Force involved two opposing principles: Ashla, representing all the goodness and compassion in the cosmos, and Bogan, embodying unrestrained, passionate emotion.

As eons passed, individuals within groups that had splintered from the original order continued to contemplate the reality of the Force and its implications in isolation. Eventually, they determined that the Force and its powers were meant to be employed in the pursuit of social responsibility, abandoning the isolationist mindset in favor of spreading the Force's benefits throughout the wider galaxy. Some individuals, such as Colonel Dyer, were simply Force-attuned, connected to the Force but unable to wield any powers.

Nevertheless, mystical power extended beyond Ashla, also called the "light side of the Force," and Bogan, also called the "dark side." Caleb, a healer, channeled power and wisdom directly from the cosmos. When his contemporary, the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Bane, sensed Caleb's power, he perceived it as the Force, but not exactly. Bane felt it was more akin to nature itself. This power enabled Caleb to greatly enhance his fortitude, and to demonstrate this to Bane, he immersed his hand in a boiling potion without flinching.

Over the eons, numerous Force users would experience a sense of connection to the cosmos when using the Force; alternately, they would perceive the entire cosmos as reacting to them in some manner. When a Force-sensitive experienced a vision of possible futures, it could seem as though time slowed down for them throughout the cosmos as they absorbed the information. When employing psychometry, a Force power that allowed one to read impressions from objects, one felt as though they could distinctly perceive the object's place within the cosmos.

The Jedi, who favored the light side of the Force over the dark side, and the Sith, who held the opposite view, clashed within the galaxy for millennia. The Jedi believed that the dark side corrupted the Sith, turning them evil. From the Sith perspective, they used the Force as a tool, embracing life, while the Jedi led restricted, weak lives in service to the Force, as dictated by the Jedi Council. At one point, a sect of Jedi apprentices theorized that the Force was neither good nor evil, and that the Force, which they renamed "the Potentium," was universally good: a wholly positive field permeating the cosmos, guiding its inhabitants to do good. They believed that connection with the Potentium should not be diluted through training or learning in one aspect of it, shunning others. With this in mind, they felt that it was impossible for the Potentium to sway someone to commit evil acts, for there was no innate malevolence in the Potentium and it could never ask that of a Force user. Followers of the Potentium philosophy were exiled from the Jedi Order for their heretical beliefs.

Successive generations of Padawans within the original Jedi Order were cautioned against embracing the Potentium's way of thinking, and Luke Skywalker, who established and led the subsequent New Jedi Order, also rejected the principle's spirit. He taught that viewing the two sides of the Force as tools, interchangeable for different situations, was an inappropriate attempt to bend the nature of the Force to one's will, and that it would cause Jedi to fall to the dark side once tempted to use it regularly.

At some point, a nihilistic scientist from the planet of Shawken created the Shawken Device, a superweapon designed to re-trigger the Big Bang, creating a new cosmos. He believed this was the only way to imbue existence with purpose, though he never reached a level of despair that would have prompted him to use it and he never told anyone how it worked. It was buried in the planet and remained there for a very long time.

In 4 ABY, Rik Duel and his gang unearthed the Shawken Device. Luke Skywalker and Kiro encountered the gang, defeated them, and deactivated the device. It remained uncertain whether it would have functioned as intended.

In 14 ABY, Hethrir bridged the divide between the cosmos and a universe in an alternate dimension, bringing an entity known as Waru into his own cosmos.

To illustrate the significance or insignificance of something, be it an object, a situation, themselves, or others, people would examine it in relation to the cosmos. Color-commentator Fode of Fodesinbeed Annodue once joked about the existence of multiple cosmoses to emphasize the pain a Podracer pilot would feel if they crashed their craft, asserting that it would hurt for a denizen of any of them. Before the Great Jedi Purge, the Jedi Master Jaled Dur created the Heart of the Universe, a gem that augmented Force powers. Conan Antonio Motti believed that the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station superweapon was the most powerful instrument of death in the cosmos.

It was also possible to describe someone with a vastly different outlook on life as existing in their own cosmos. For example, Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi from the planet of Stewjon, viewed Roper Slam as being in his own cosmos, as the latter was a gangster far removed from the Jedi and their refined lifestyle.

There was also the notion that even individual people and small acts could instigate change on a grander scale. Shmi Skywalker, a slave on the planet of Tatooine, once told her son, Anakin Skywalker, that every act of kindness slightly alleviated the problems of the cosmos. However, Anakin felt there was far too much strife for him to do anything about it easily. Shmi encouraged him to make a habit of trying anyway. She believed that the biggest problem in the cosmos was that no one helped anyone else, and she dedicated herself to working against this by finding ways to aid whoever was in need.

Moreover, individuals from the galaxy tended to have a perspective on existence centered around their own galaxy. They often referred to the galaxy as "the cosmos." This semantic centralism permeated galactic society to the point that almost every civilized person on Coruscant considered it to be the center of the cosmos. This was also qualified as "the center of the Known Cosmos," and the Jedi regarded their Temple on that world as the center of civilized society in the Known Cosmos.

The word universal and its derivatives were used to describe things as all encompassing.

In reference to the natural order of things, as they interpreted it, people would assert that it was how the cosmos functioned. Darth Chratis, a Sith who served the Sith Empire during the Great Galactic War, attempted to persuade Padawan Shigar Konshi to become his apprentice by explaining why the Sith killed others. He told Konshi of his Empire's subjects who harbored hatred for the Jedi because they had killed similarly as a means to stop the Sith: taking the lives of those peoples' family and friends. He believed that killing was not to be shied away from because it was how to gain the upper hand over others and that that was the way the cosmos worked: strength was honed by conflicts, a person or group pitted against an enemy and overcoming them.

A similar doctrine was also followed by the Banite Sith in their practice of the Code of the Sith. Darth Zannah learned from her Master that life was defined by conflict and that it took strength to survive. People who could not endure their strife, or became complacent, were snuffed out soon enough and it was their own fault. In the practice of the dark side, they saw this idea as crucial: the reason there were those who followed the dark path and regretted it for the damage it did to their lives was that they were too weak to control themselves in their pursuits. Those people were not fit to use the dark side to shape their world and ascend to true freedom and self-reliance, dominating the wills of those around them.

Caleb, Serra's father who had been killed by Zannah, saw the opposite as the truth: that instead of asserting dominance, the strong should help the weak be strong as well. Caleb was a healer from the planet of Ambria, where he helped those in need, though not Jedi or Sith. He followed neither the light side of the Force or the dark side, not wanting to support either, and found power in the cosmos that one could draw on for wisdom and strength. When Bane encountered the man, he found that Caleb's will was augmented not by the Force, in a strict sense, but instead his inner power was derived from nature. He instilled his ideals and this practice into his daughter, warning her against giving into the dark side that he perceived as evil. Serra once tried to debate with Bane on this point after her husband, Gerran, was killed many years later, which spurred her to seek out her father's killer and exact her revenge—she was convinced that Bane had murdered him. She found that Bane, whom she had captured and was torturing to avenge her loved ones, threw her points back at her saying that Caleb's philosophy was why her father had been killed. When she told him that she wanted him to know what being victimized felt like, he said that he already had experienced that and had overcome it to make himself stronger, using that to validate his view. Moreover, he stated that had he been stronger, more cautious, he would not have let himself be captured by the princess in the first place. When he escaped, he resolved to kill Serra in order to overcome that show of weakness.

On Serra's side, fearing for her life, she came to a resolution that her father's universal interpretation was correct and that it was abandoning her father's teachings that had brought her to where she was. Instead of coming to terms with what had happened to her, she gave in to her desires for penance, which lead to a series of decisions made in this pursuit that culminated ultimately in her death at the hands of Bane's second apprentice, Darth Cognus, who was introduced to the Dark Lord because of Serra's actions.

Still, though many Force users contemplated the cosmos with its relationship to the Force in mind, there was a division between knowing the spiritual ways of the Force and the ways of the cosmos. When faced with reality by venturing out from his studies at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, Obi-Wan Kenobi realized he had lived a sheltered life and was appalled by the depravity and greed he witnessed from a slaver named Jemba. This was enough for him to question momentarily his future as a Jedi, a servant of the Force, wondering if despite his conditioning he was still capable of unsavory acts, a person in the cosmos who wanted Jemba to pay for his actions with his life. Jedi were notorious for their reluctance to follow military orders when these conflicted with their creed.

Hylo Visz believed that if someone lost faith in their abilities, they would not be able to progress at all.

A young Boba Fett, new to bounty hunting, once observed the underside of a Tibanna mining settlement on the planet of Bespin and took note of the predatory hierarchy observed by the plants and animals living there. Fett saw this as an example of how harsh the cosmos could be, and he resolved to be like his father and be tough as well.

Some would muse that the cosmos, sometimes the galaxy, was sentient, actively affecting their situations, or, more generally, in a destiny they were meant to fulfill. Force users like Darth Sidious believed this was done through the Force, which Force-sensitives were able to use to have visions of the future. Jedi like Yoda advised caution in their interpretation because the future was always changing. Darth Sidious, believing in the Force believed that if one was inelegant in anticipating events this way, their chances at their most advantageous foreseen outcome would be dashed instantly and irrevocably. In this vein, many things people dismissed as happenstance would be interpreted as the will of the Force by Sith or Jedi. Darth Bane, Dark Lord of the Sith, believed that this aided him in his search for Sith artifacts: there was a natural cycle to the strength of the dark side and the power of the Sith. Sith artifacts tended to be lost when they weakened. When they increased, Bane could sense, manipulate, and take advantage of this to successfully seek such objects out. There was credence to these precognitive beliefs, as shown in the truth of such visions, but the correlation was actually stronger than most were able to perceive. It was the Force user who was unable to read the future properly. Darth Tenebrous achieved extraordinarily accurate predictions because he had a biological advantage over other Sith and Jedi: he was of the Bith species. The cognitive abilities of his species were unmatched in the galaxy and he used that in tandem with his skills as a master mathematician to calculate the future quantitatively. Even when it did not involve visions of the future, if a Force-user sensed something or received another kind of signal, they would interpret it as the Force attempting to guide them.

When in severely dire straights, people would think the cosmos was out to get them, sometimes thinking it demonstrated a sense of humor in its execution. Nonetheless, good influences were registered as well. Still others, like the princess Serra, thought that the cosmos was completely random, albeit cruel.

Luke Skywalker and his Jedi High Council believed that the blossoming love between his son, Ben Skywalker, and a Sith named Vestara Khai may have been the will of the Force.

An example of someone believing the cosmos could benefit people with its supposed sentience, the smuggler Hylo Visz believed that small instances of bad luck were harbingers of greater misfortune. These were warnings directly from the cosmos while good signs foreshadowed positive events. She termed this the Invisible Law of the Universe and was convinced of its validity by events like her father's landspeeder breaking down the day before his death. She believed that if she was not having bad luck, she was not in danger and felt she could perform any feat she liked without being harmed if she maintained faith in herself while being wary of messages stemming from the Invisible Law.

The Sith Lord Daiman was born in 1057 BBY and grew to believe that he was the Creator of the Cosmos because he was bored in his former existence and wanted a challenge, so he created a new one and all within it. Everything in creation was, as extensions of his spirit made manifest, insignificant compared to him. Every action anyone took, in his view, was either a move for his benefit or one to undermine his absolute authority. On the other hand, his brother, Odion, believed that his own purpose was to destroy as much as possible, though he focused on the galaxy instead of the whole cosmos. All people existed to be killed by him.

Kell Douro, an Anzati assassin who lived during the Imperial Period, claimed he could see what he called daen nosi, a phrase from his species' language that meant "fate lines" in Basic, when he used his proboscises to consume the soup, or brain matter, of another. Douro believed these lines crossed the cosmos and bound Fate together, a network of every sentient choice related to every other choice through knotting, and that by consuming the brains of Force sensitives he would be able to untangle them and completely understand Fate. Soup from some people was more potent than the soup from others, and consuming the former provided him with a clearer picture of how this network was woven.

In 43 ABY, Kell Douro became convinced that consuming the soup of a Jedi named Jaden Korr would finally allow him to understand the daen nosi in full. He was killed before he could do so.

Although some uses of the term "cosmos" within the Star Wars galaxy might have referred simply to the galaxy itself, the presence of other galaxies linked by space implies the existence of a cosmos. Furthermore, The Crystal Star established a distinct difference between the space-time of the cosmos and Waru's universe, indicating that everything appearing in the standard Star Wars cosmos is relative to it, even if the concept of various galaxies as parts of a unified celestial association has not been explicitly elaborated upon in any source.

While most sources tend to simply use "the cosmos" in reference to it, Boba Fett: The Fight to Survive, a 2002 young-reader novel by Terry Bisson, gave it the proper noun name "Known Cosmos." This terminology was also used in an earlier novel, Rogue Planet by Greg Bear, but it was not treated as a proper noun. This phrase is used for our own universe because light has not yet traveled far enough for us to be able to see the entire universe. Because the universe is also expanding, the entire universe may never be observed.

It is common practice for people and the publishers of the stories to refer to the events in the Star Wars galaxy as events in the "Star Wars cosmos," as the events in the Legends continuity outside the main six films are collectively called the Expanded Universe. Events in the stories are called in-cosmos, and things outside them are called out-of-cosmos.

The galaxy is said to be "far, far away" from our real galaxy, meaning that the cosmos is the same body as our real universe. Certain references have hinted at this. For instance, the Buick, an Easter egg in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike, was described as "a relic from a galaxy far, far away," when covering the origins and specs of the vehicle. As an easter egg, its canonicity is ambiguous.