Posts tagged planets
In the science fiction setting I'm working on, one of the factions are supposed to be using naturally occurring antimatter because the systems they reside in have sufficient natural sources of it. ...
What would happen to a planet if its core suddenly disappeared? I'm talking instantly and without warning, gone. I'm not concerned with how scientifically accurate this would be, because I'm absol...
Let us assume that my new world has within its rings, shells, and blobs of remarkably cool magnetically-involved stuff such that its magnetic field is toroidal (shaped like a donut) rather than sph...
I've been thinking about terraforming and planets in general. We can look at the planets we know that might be terraformable - Venus and Mars - and understand the technical requirements for doing ...
I am working with a story. I wish to make my story somewhat logical by adding some science and thereby not making it to appear fantasy. This story is on a fictional planet far away from Earth. Let...
I wrote a story in which humans live on huge trees on a fictional habitable planet similar to earth. the tree would be even more huge than the hometree from avatar. The tree is not taller than th...
I know there are questions similar to this, but I'm not very scientific minded, and wanted to check with you guys how this would work exactly. I don't care what else I need to add into the equation...
Assume Mars has developed an indigenous civilization of its own, perhaps as seen in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. Much like Earth, Mars' years and days would be significant for any in...
I'd like to explore some details on a so-called water-ball planet (i.e. a planet in the habitable zone of a sun, covered by a 100 km deep ocean). I am particularly interested where life could devel...
I'm heavily ignorant when it comes to mathematics and just science in general, but I have thought of four habitable planets, all of them revolving around a K-type sun. They're all colonized by huma...
So, I know that on the planet earth, the force of gravity is actually slightly less nearer the equator, due to the Centrifugal Centripetal Spinny Force. Not by a whole lot, but by some small amount...
Before we begin, this system is created by aliens, and all orbits are on the same plane. These orbits are similar to earth's in shape. So, none of this has to occur naturally it just has to be stab...
I am considering setting my next D&D campaign on an earthlike but small planet. By "small," I am imagining a world that still feels vast, yet is circumnavigable over land and/or water with low ...
I'm thinking a planet orbiting a nearby star colonized by human settlers sometime in the not near, but not too distant future. How small could a planet be while still standing in as a relatively c...
Given the daylight cycle discussed here (see the graph in the selected answer), suppose that the moon revolves in the equatorial plane, at a distance sufficient to light (barely) the poles, avoidin...
A targeted hard-science spin-off from this question: In a tidally-locked planet that rotates about a barycentric point that's located outside of its own sphere, what would the coriolis forces be l...
I am imagining a special ecosystem on a rogue planet (a planet that wanders throughout space without orbiting a star or other heavenly object) but I would need your help to fill in the gaps and rea...
I need a habitable body with 64-hour days and nights... but only on one hemisphere. The other side is perpetually dark. Is such a thing possible? I'm picturing a tidally-locked moon orbiting a ga...
If an Earthlike planet were fragmented into thousands of fragments (ranging in size from many small city sized rocks up to a dozens of small country sized rocks and a few Australia sized rocks) via...
If $8.8 \times 10^{16} m^3$ of water volume is added to the surface of Venus, how would I calculate how much of Venus would be covered in water? The land of Venus has its topographical features wi...
In my world an alien creature claims to be from an earth-like planet orbiting a 500 light-years away solar analog star. It tells us that the planet has x mass, y diameter, z orbital period, that sp...
I'm actually trying to create an alien ecosystem, so changing orbits, what's exhibiting tidal forces and the geography and such is welcome if needed. I also wonder how stable a setup with dramatic ...
For my story, I need there to be a planet close to the home world of my species (in the same star system) that the species could easily get to and easily colonize, but that does not have its own li...
We have already discussed how difficult it would be to blow up a planet like Earth, basically deciding that you can't do that with any reasonable amounts of energy. But what if I don't need to blow...
Consider a rogue planet, moving in a region of complete void absent any type of star (they all burned out). It is orbited by an artificial moon which shines and serves as the planet's sun. However,...
My friend is writing a book, and I volunteered to create a planet for him, one with an epic mountain extending far above the clouds. The planet features lush jungles in the lower elevations and e...
I wish to clarify my doubts regarding time dilation Is it possible for a planet to be habitable like Edmund's planet from interstellar, which has somewhat similar gravitational force as Earth (9....
On Earth we don't really notice many effects of the Earth spinning, apart from the day-night cycle. It took a long time for people of Earth to realise that it even was spinning, but there are measu...
I recently watched a special on cave divers in the Yucatan Peninsula and part way through that show the divers encountered a feature called a Halocline, a meeting of two different water masses of d...
Suppose you have a planet covered in a deep layer of supercritical CO2, and animals evolved to live in it. Discounting the ones who crawl along the bottom, would their method of locomotion be more...
This planet is fictional, but I want it to be credible all the same. It is the same size and composition of Earth, orbiting a sun-like star. But that's where the similarities end. The planet's or...
How would waves and tides work on a planet that is completely covered by Ocean? It would have: Oceans of Similar depth to Earth's Atmosphere extremely similar to Earth's Same type of star and di...
I'm working out a concept for a story where there's a gas giant with at least 6 habitable moons (willing to use teraforming tech to get over any big hurdles) and the planet itself has a ring of roc...
These planets would be similar in size to Earth. Mars and Venus don't need to exist in this scenario. So how many Earth-like worlds can be squeezed into the sun's "goldilocks" zone? Mars and Venu...
For a long, long, long time I have had a concept of a world that exists on the inside of a hallowed-out sphere. The basic construction of the world is like this: It is a large world, at the cent...
I'm working on a story right now where darkness plays an important role, and I had the idea to set my story on a rogue planet, a planet in perpetual darkness because it has no sun. However, from wh...
My case is this: My protagonists live in an earthlike world where living in a city on 90kms approximately, protected by extremely big fences so the sandstorm won't hit them. Anyway, they think...
What would be the major changes that could happen if Earth experienced a solar eclipse caused by a fictional planet for a minimum of 10 days? Mainly what would happen to the oceans and flora in suc...
Assume we have a planet similar to earth in size and materials. But we put it in orbit of a mass much greater then our sun so that the year becomes much shorter like 10 days (or put it much closer ...
I am trying to figure out the geological effects that would happen if earths upper mantle was drained of heat. I am sure there are many ways that this could happen but the method that I am asking ...
Some published settings -- such as the Greyhawk 'verse commonly seen in conjunction with Dungeons & Dragons -- treat the prime planet's host solar system as geocentric. How could this be reconc...
A planet in one of my solar systems has 100% of its surface covered in deep water, many hundreds of kilometers deep. Some criteria relating to the planet. It's fairly close to its host, a sunlike...
The inspiration came from the music in the title sequence of the film Alien. The idea is a planet that humans have colonized where it's almost always drizzling slightly. It's always dark but there...
In my story, a team of scientists are sent to an alien world similar to Earth to conduct general research on its environment, ecosystem (that is: its animal- and plant-life), and weather. It is the...
As you know, Earth has active and moving techtonic plates known as the lithosphere. They float on the asthenosphere and slowly move about. Here's my question: Can a planet with a hot molten core h...
Or, technically, a civilization near the core of a planet. In this question I will describe some aspect of my design, and you may comment on the realism of these aspects and add improvements, or p...
The planet has a radius of 128 kilometres and the surface gravity is the same as Earth's. My calculations have discovered that the planet would have a density of about 50 times the Earth's: $$g_P=g...
How powerful would a series of explosions have to be to significantly change a planet's axial tilt? In my universe they have highly energy efficient crystals, not only do they store energy but the...
Does anyone have any ideas on a world with clumps of different atmospheres? Like what if a world has weather patterns that move around different atmosphere types; a mostly sulphur atmosphere, oxyge...
From pictures I've seen, all rocky planets in our solar system are some shade of grey, brown, and red. Ignoring stuff like atmosphere and oceans and plant life of course. I was thinking of a world...
