Posts tagged astronomy
My main antagonist is an infant Great One that's been imprisoned below the Moon's surface and I want its influence and physical form to have a weakness to direct sunlight which, I think, gives me a...
On an alternative Earth live the people of Tcelonia. One of their founding myths goes that, in the dawn of times, when they were under the menace of being attacked by an enemy population, for an e...
Bob is older than he looks. Specifically, even though Bob looks like he's in his twenties or thirties (it's hard to tell), he was actually born in Europe about ten thousand years ago, long before ...
Premise I envisage a world of would-be navigators with roughly Bronze Age technology, sailing on ships to explore their planet. In contrast to our history of navigation where we "cracked the code"...
There are many questions on WBSE that cover most aspects of building a planetary system. (some examples below): Creating a realistic world(s) map - planetary systems How many planets should I ha...
An astrophysical jet is a stream of particles emitted by matter falling into an supermassive star/black hole, travelling at up to 80% the speed of light. A troll with a portal gun (which places p...
Background: I'm writing a nomadic society that lives in the shadow of their planet's rings. These rings are as wide as possible to grant them the biggest shadow. The planet has an incredibly long y...
In this scenario we have a brown dwarf with a powerful magnetic dynamo from metallic hydrogen. The magnetic field is modeled after Jupiter's but just three orders of magnitude more powerful. Orbi...
Scenario: While poking around in an alien ruin, scientists discover a gateway which offers instant transportation to an Earth-like world. The Observed World: The gateway leads to an area that is ...
What I want to know is if an asteroid about 15 KM in diameter and roughly double that in length, spinning at a significant speed, could go undiscovered until a crew of an asteroid mining ship happe...
The 12 planets in my solar system orbit the G-type star of Nemo. It's about nine-tenths of the size of the sun, and has a stellar luminosity of 0.67 L☉, a diameter of 1.28 million kilometres, a s...
I just wanna ask which option requires more destructive energy? Option 1 : destroying a planet like earth to rubble (tiny pieces of rocks) Or Option 2: splitting a planet like earth in halves ...
Ok, I get it, me dumb, you smart. Only smart questions allowed. In any case I'm going to leave the question unaltered in case some others might get something out of the answers. Thanks to everyon...
In its wandering through the Milky Way, the solar system is getting close to a solitary neutron star. The neutron star will "fly by" above the plane of the ecliptic and its closest distance from th...
Here's what I've come up with: The star: A main sequence star, roughly a sol analogue Younger than Sol (say 3-3.5 billion years old) roughly the same starting mass as Sol, but has had less tim...
So, in my research and preparation for the question I asked immediately before this one, I was introduced to the concept of "fluffy" gas giants, gas giants with significantly lower density than wou...
[EDIT: this question is about life on Earth surviving, not the physical destruction of the planet] Could the Earth survive a gamma ray burst if that burst occurred in our galaxy and the Earth is ...
Let's say there exists an Earth-like exoplanet which orbits a normal star, with a similar process regarding the evolution of life on earth, yet the star became a red giant during said evolution. A...
Suppose humans of the late 21st century or beyond began constructing a solar shield as a solution to climate change. Suppose for some reason (open to suggestions) they choose to build the shield in...
I'm looking for a map of stars within a few hundred LY of the Sun. I'd like to be able to add text tags to stars, so I can name them within my SF universe. Then I'd like to be able to rotate the im...
I have a sci-fi/fantasy world with two suns. Only one sun can be present in the sky at a time. A full day-night cycle would be: Night time Sun 1 rises Sun 1 sets Sun 2 rises Sun 2 sets Night time...
The selected answer on this question provides an extremely good, and detailed, description of what is generally accepted to be the main (only?) way a terrestrial planet can form, i.e. through accre...
What would a planet's rings look like from the surface of that planet? Would the rings be perceived to be stationary or move across the sky, and would the alignment of the rings relative to the ax...
I'm trying to construct a solar system, and I'm toying with the idea that the planet capable of sustaining life was initially outside of the habitable zone, but the star's advanced age has caused t...
I know that objects with lower mass tends to orbit objects with higher mass, is it possible to have a Moon sized planet who's mass is so heavy that an Earth sized planet orbit it as it's Moon in a ...
Some Context I'm creating a universe where humanity has reached the stars. They've colonized a few star systems and, obviously, FTL drives are a common thing. They basically jump you to another lo...
Say we have a group of space travelers who have been frozen inside a sleeper ship for an enormous amount of time that left when Earth was recognizable. When they thaw out and reach their destinatio...
Inspired by this question, how might one determine the shape of the world given a cosmology with no cycles? The moon, sun, stars, and planets are all fixed. The Earth does not rotate. You can't ...
Obviously there would be a lot of small (not to mention a couple large) changes humans would need to get used to on a planet that rotates much faster than Earth. The biggest one I'm concerned about...
A Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale has decided to build a telescope. This civilization spans its home galaxy and wields vast energies capable of moving and shaping matter on the scale of...
I am aware that there are a lot of answers explaining the fundamentals of a tidally locked "Earth-like" moon around a giant gas planet. For example this one: Habitable moon of a gas giant: working ...
I bring you all to the planet Krikkit, stuck in a star system enshrouded by a large dust cloud which prevents the Krikkiters from seeing the rest of the galaxy - and, by extension, the universe. Th...
What would the effect on Earth be if Mars, in the space of one second, disappeared from the Solar System? Just simply was gone, leaving no residue, and leaving the space where it had been like it h...
A XX century researcher time traveled back into the prehistory. He is not in danger of death or anything, but he has only energy to attempt one jump. He must jump back during the sunrise either i...
Segue 2 is a galaxy with only about 1000 stars and is 111 light years in radius. It has a light output only 900 times that of our sun. (This is a real galaxy in our universe) However, I want my fi...
So I'm writing a story and decided to use Hida Furukawa as the location. It has a high school with a field of 650 ft that theoretically could be used for a small aircraft to be use to take off. In ...
Within our local region of space are several hundred/thousand stars. I had long ago found some pretty good resources and made a starmap (using YGraph and some star catalog datasets I got from Nyra...
First post, if it isn't completely obvious. I've discovered this site by trying to "google" that question. Here's what I'm investigating: Long ago, pre-deluvian civilizations built ancient megalit...
This question is a sort of follow-up to Samuel's previous world map question, Creating a realistic world(s) map - planetary systems. Lots of science fiction stories involve journeying to nearby st...
I'm trying to flesh out the history of a fictional galactic society, specifically the initial settlements and inhabited worlds. Something that I thought would be important to settlers would be an a...
My protagonist is an astronomer in a fantasy world. Ideally, what I want is software where I can specify some properties of this planet, e.g. orbital and rotation period, nearby stars, number of m...
If there was a planet half the earth's diameter, for which every other aspect of the earth was changed proportionally to keep the Earth's perfect ratio intact (including having the perfect orbital ...
I found an interesting Wikipedia article, quoted in an answer here. I'm looking into writing a story where someone has built a Death Star. The purpose of this craft is important to the story (and ...
Suppose that a planet whose size was somewhere between the sizes of Mercury and Jupiter impacted the Sun. Would such an event change local stellar activity sufficiently enough and for long enough ...
So I was reading this article recently, titled Stellar Outburst Brings Water Snow Line into View: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1626. In short it's about a protoplanetary accretion disc around ...
I'm trying to create a world where there's an equator-like divide running along the axis(?) of the planet and the two hemispheres are perpetually different in terms of temperature. Basically, I wan...
Let's suppose a solar system: A main-sequence star similar to the Sun. G2V or so. A Hot/Warm Jupiter HJ with a semi-major axis somewhere from 0.5 AU to 0.0001 AU. An Earth-like planet EL with a s...
I am creating a world in which a civilization has achieved advanced spaceflight and has begone colonizing other planets in their solar system that is similar to ours, but with more planets. However...
I'm trying to "build" a world in which the moon is always visible at night, and only at night, to the majority of areas on that world. I've been told that an L2 Legrange point could be a viable con...
Imagine we have a faster-than-light drive which costs ~$250,000 USD per drive and can propel an ISS-sized craft at 1000 times the speed of light. It is reliable and has safeguards that stop it from...
