Posts tagged astronomy
A young B-type star (with a mass of about 10 M$_{\odot}$) is surrounded by a debris disk extending from about 2 AU to 1000 AU away. The disk has a mass of about 300 Earth masses - enough to form qu...
As far as we know Earth and every other planet in the solar system rotate around their axes. Whether it be Uranus which rotates on its side or Mercury which rotates perfectly straight, all planets ...
The Milky Way and Andromeda will collide a few billion years in the future. Stellar collisions will be rare because - as Douglas Adams put it - "Space is big. Really, really big." In the galactic d...
If you're studying radio signals from Earth, is it possible to calculate whether a radio source is 'near' as in near Earth or 'very far away' as in somewhere far out in space from velocity, or velo...
I've had a number of interesting conversations with people about how the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will evolve in the future. The CMB is the sea of photons left over from the epoch of recom...
What will be the view of the sky and the distances between stars, living on a planet or in a habitat in a super galaxy that has merged with all its nearby galaxies in its cluster, at a time in the ...
I have done some research and so much contradict one another or I simply fail to understand. Do seasons occur on a tidally locked planet that isn't tilted on its axis?
I'm currently designing a world where the inhabitants see the Aurora Borealis on an almost nightly basis almost all the way to the equator. The lights are so strong they rarely see the stars beyond...
As you can probably guess from the title, I have some questions about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, especially how to use it to make plausible stars. Some questions: Can stars exist in the bl...
I'd like to be able to determine the appearance of the night sky from an Earth-like planet, in a solar system with multiple other planets, moons, and other bodies. Here on Earth, we can directly me...
A hypothetical scenario I'm batting around in my head is a Habitable Gas Giant system consisting of a roughly Saturn sized body orbiting a sun like star at a comfy goldilocks zone distance. Orbitin...
So far I've been using Artifexian's How To Build A Star YouTube video. The problem with this video is that it's quite old and thus outdated. The things I've noticed to be particularly weird are the...
Roughly how long could an 'Oumuamua type object get if created naturally or if created artificially using fused rock? What would be the limiting factor governing the length of such objects? Oumaum...
If you took a giant drill (~one hundred meter circumference) and bored down two kilometers into the moon, what would it look like (assuming the lighting was good)? Is there a gradient, or is it a u...
In a scenario in which all heavenly bodies are flat including earth. How to bring the effect of day and night effect like now i.e when day in japan and night in USA . Considering nobody can live b...
This is a science fiction intelligent alien biology question. I'm imagining a race of large (around 2m in height) insect-like species on a distant planet who discovered astronomy VERY late in thei...
Fairly straightforward question. Imagine a gas giant planet, like the size of Jupiter, in orbit around a massive star. The star goes supernova. What happens to the planet? Is the energy of the su...
I know the orbital period of my planet and the rotational period of my planet. Now how do I calculate the solar day? It would only be a small difference to be sure, but do remember that if we didn'...
Our universe is incredibly young, relative to its total life span. How young? Well, it contains stars. Giant balls of readily fusing hydrogen and helium that give off a pleasant glow, suitable for ...
The dominant religion on my world (created by a race of dragon-like humanoids) believes that their species originates from an ancient being that sacrificed itself to defeat a great evil at the cen...
In my setting, there's a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf (for specificity, its radius is about half Jupiter's, and it's 0.35 AU from 61 Cygni B. Ignore the effect of the oth...
I've been working on a sci-fi series set about 1000 years in our future. The discovery of an alien threat leads the ruling government to conceive of a doomsday machine, which they hope will be so p...
I'm imagining a hypothetical scenario based on the Big Rip theory of the end of the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip), where eventually the expansion of the universe causes everythin...
I'm working on a comic which is essentially alternate-history fiction, and a big upcoming part of it involves the formation of the Chicxulub crater 63 million years ago. As I am a stickler for acc...
I'm trying to build a story around a supermassive black hole, which is ejected from a merger of two galaxies, that is hurtling our own way. What is the smallest realistic distance at which the blac...
On Earth, sailors would navigate the oceans at night by using the stars as guides; since there are no landmarks in the ocean like there are on land (save for the occasional island), that's pretty m...
I'm considering a story where an exploration is devised to explore a binary system containing a black hole; the choice is Cygnus X-1, with its companion supergiant star HDE 226868. It would likely ...
The planet has 256 days in a year, split up into eight months, each with 32 days. My planet is a bit smaller than Earth: Think, enough space for the continents of Earth's western hemisphere and th...
So, I'm trying to figure out a world's cycle (length of a year, day, etc.). The planet, Vixeruka, is about 3 times larger than Earth is, making it a super-Earth, and it's the second planet from it...
In the story I'm making, it is important that there are two suns in the sky, going at different rythms (maybe the planet orbits one of them each year, and the other each four years, for instance), ...
The exoplanet in question is Proxima Centauri b. How might the mid-to-upper-level atmosphere of that planet be dangerously radioactive and full of airborne nuclear reagents, without it being the do...
In my world, a group of "lamplighters" seek to turn off unused stars to conserve the energy for later use. This serves a few purposes, but mainly: It delays the heat-death of the Universe to some...
I'm trying to develop a realistic system with a limited understanding of astrodynamics. Is it possible to have two binary worlds capable of sustaining atmosphere and complex life orbiting one anot...
The length of a day on different planets in the solar system varies a lot. For instance, Mars' day is about the same length as Earth, while a day on Venus is equivalent to 243 Earth days (source). ...
I am making a story of a species who lives on a planet several light-years above the Galactic Bulge. With advanced technology, how much could they see from their vantage point? Could they carry out...
Black holes are created by the gravitational collapse of massive stars. But in theory, black holes can also be created by any mass at all that is confined within a small enough volume of space, de...
Trying to work out mechanics and visuals from one of two moons orbiting a gas giant. My idea is that the moons are tidally locked so they can never see each other's backsides, but this might be ach...
Assume that you have a Rogue Planet hurtling through deep space. Somehow, an alien civilization from, say, 1,000 ly away acquires astronomical data from this planet. This data is in the form of h...
With the potential for an impact event to trigger volcanic activity on the opposite side of the planet, what is the largest plateau of flood basalt physically capable of forming on Earth, post-impa...
With the proper composition and mass, is it possible for a planetary body to collide with Earth and embed itself onto the mantle? To clarify, while immense destruction would undoubtedly occur to t...
Suppose that both Earth and Mars was booming with life in a similar way. Except that, on Earth, there was no hominid family, and no humans evolved. Instead, humans evolved on Mars. Assuming we ha...
Is it physically possible for a complex crater to form and remain stable after an impact event large enough to deform the Earth's crust globally, insofar that the surface of the planet becomes unre...
So I have the following scenario for a story, and I want to know if it runs into any ridiculous no-nos from a scientific point of view: There is an earth-like world orbiting a red dwarf (similar t...
For this question, the word 'metals' does not refer to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It instead refers to metals as defined by the periodic table of elements. After researching the ab...
I am wondering about Tatooine, and was reading about binary systems here, which provided a lot of good basic food for thought. My specific question is not addressed at that link, and so I pose it h...
I would like a planet that's a tropical paradise on one side but covered in ice and glaciers on the opposite side, whether it be the Southern-Northern or the Western-Eastern hemisphere. I know it...
Is it possible for a planetary body to have a secondary axis of rotation? For example let's say there's an Earth-like body that is spinning with its North Pole facing the Sun. Imagine that the Nort...
In my alternate reality, Earth is not a planet. It is a moon and orbits a gas giant (however it has all of Earth's characteristics, it is also full of humans and life as we know it). This is the on...
The planet in my story, Ser, is actually in reality a moon orbiting a larger body called planet Rea. Ser is located in the L1 Lagrangian point, which means it takes the same amount of time to orbit...
Y'all should know by now that I want to build a Death Star ;-) Let's assume that we did that already -- and against the odds, we've built two of them, and they're currently in orbit around a plane...
