Posts tagged planets
In recent years, we have discovered exoplanets that defy our traditional perspectives on how planets work. WASP-17b is twice as wide as Jupiter, yet half as massive, probably because of its orbita...
Planet has these characteristics: Half of the planet is always on day, and other half is always night (it rotates at the same velocity as its orbit) There are no underground water sources; it's a...
Assuming the world in question to be of similar size to ours, same proportion of atmosphere etc. but whose surface is perfectly flat, and has a 0 degree axle tilt what sort of weather/wind current ...
I was doing research on the terraforming of planets with a solid iron core and no magnetic field and saw a few suggested ideas for starting a magnetic field on Mars that got me thinking. Most of w...
It has become accepted knowledge that the planet Earth was birthed via a swirling cloud of dust and gravel clumping into larger and larger pieces of rock. It began 4.54 billion years ago, and 100 ...
What restrictions this planet must have to make it possible? Planet can have any size, be made of any material A human must be able to land in it and observe it, dust added to the planet from the...
So my planet is tidally locked, it constantly faces its star like the moon faces Earth. One side is completely frozen, the other is burning hot. There is an atmosphere that allows life, and people ...
In a comment to this question imallett brought up the idea of a gas giant spinning so fast that the air is moving at near orbital velocity. In Mission of Gravity Hal Clement has Mesklin spin so fa...
A simple question, could a moon exist and stay whole if it was inside the ring of asteroids orbiting a planet? And as a side note, would it create a kind of bulge in the ring where the asteroids su...
I am writing a story that is meant to take place after the death of the sun. However, 7.5 billion years might be a little long for most people to stomach. Is there anything that could cause the sun...
Let's say Earth's nations meet up and decide to start to colonize space in the next ~50 years. What would the first resources/materials be, that we gather in space/from other planets that we need t...
I'm looking to not tidally lock my planet, but place it between two suns that rotate around each other. The goal is to have constant sunlight on all sides of the planet and for the suns to rotate a...
I'm contemplating a world in which there is some sort of cyclical darkness that covers a continent or the whole planet, and humanity has to adjust to deal with the creatures that surface when the d...
I want to create a planet that has a frequency of two rotations per second, thus making a "Planet without Night". The planet will be like a flattened disc, due to inertia causing the planet to be a...
My Kepler Bb world has in total 8 seasons. 4 of those are transition phases. Their year begins on the first day of spring and their months with 9 day weeks are 65 days long. But that is just in Kep...
So, you have eight planets in the solar system. Mars, Saturn, etc etc. **What would happen to poor old Earth if, for some yet unknown law, some handwavium, or that statement, the aliens did it, if ...
Let's use Mercury as an example, we can pretend it orbits in the habitable zone of the Sun, would Mercury's magnetic field be able to protect an Earth like atmosphere? And would the lower gravity m...
Say we had a planet which was a gas giant. Is it possible that at the core of the planet where meteors, asteroids, and comet debris had collected that there could be a layer of atmosphere similar t...
For this scenario Satellite means an object that orbits the planet, and my satellite is going to be a moon and the structure would be a giant tube going to another planet. What would the people on ...
I am looking for help on the following: Will that have any affect on the length of days and nights? Would having two moons create a higher body of water on the planet due to increased tides? (i....
If I have a typical Dyson sphere, around my star, it will block the light needed to live on an orbiting planet. Is there any other megastructure that can function like a Dyson Sphere, but does al...
Well, I ask the question because apparently I am going to aim for NaNoWriMo. I am calculating the density of a planet with 1.8 Earth masses and 0.9 Earth radii, but last I checked, the calculation...
I want to set up a long-term self-sustaining colony on Mercury. What and how needs to be done for a colony to survive and thrive on the planet Mercury?
I'm exploring various kinds of potentially habitable planets as part of a universe-building exercise, and have recently delved into the fascinating concept of carbon-rich planets. My question is mu...
After reading Is it possible to build a bridge between planets?, I wonder: what situation would provide technology support that enables them to make the trip, but limits them to walking speed? Th...
Say a terrestrial planet is orbiting two stars as if they're a single gravitational well.(I haven't worked out the distance yet as I still on the phone...) I don't need the planet to be habitable b...
Long story short I need a unique ring system around a Jovian planet and thus I think of möbius strip. Can a gas giant have a ring system shaped like möbius strip exist naturally? Why do I post ...
Take the Earth-Moon system as we know it. Now, something causes a large rock to be lobbed in the direction of our moon. Exactly how that happens is deliberately left unspecified; it could be everyt...
What would the orbit of a planet orbiting two stars look like? Would the planet orbit the stars simultaneously or one after the other? How strong might be the gravity well of such a system be? Any ...
What I want is to know if I could have seven Earth like (What I mean by this is having an Earth-like atmosphere and climate, in this scenario size doesn't matter and nor does gravity) planets in th...
I had the idea to make an artificially constructed planet which is terrestrial, but has the diameter of Jupiter. Instead of being a solid sphere, it would be five spherical layers, with land on the...
I know living on Venus would be virtually impossible for us now. But I'm trying to picture what life would be like on the surface of such a world, and how advanced in technology a species would hav...
Context NASA commissioned some awesome, vintage-style prints a while back advertising the colonization of Mars. Three of them stood out to me because they depicted colonization of the moons of ...
I want to build a planet (or satellite) that: is smaller than Earth, has a thicker atmosphere than Earth but breathable, has neither intense volcanism, nor any extreme condition of that sort that...
How can I make it so that an otherwise colonizable planet (or moon) can (entirely naturally) seem uninhabitable from a certain point on its surface? Background: There are a series of immovable gat...
I plan to write a story about a large number of space probes that are equipped with artificial intelligence and told to explore star systems and travel between them. These probes are not equipped w...
If there existed a planet that was made completely of liquid water, no solid matter at all, what would the core of such a planet be like? Let's assume that this planet has conditions similar to ear...
I've read that the atmosphere about 60 km from the surface of Venus is very similar to the atmosphere on earth (the oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 levels and pressures are about the same). If there was a way,...
So I was building my world with underwater civilizations and someone raised a question (see here) that I thought was interesting related to trade aspect: how would we have a standardized measuremen...
Exploring this new star system you have been pretty lucky to find an Earth like planet, with plenty of Oxygen, both in gaseous and in chemically bonded state (water, rocks, etc.). Just before you ...
Here is what we know of the planet Mars so far: DIAMETER: 4212 miles MASS: 6.39 × 10^23 kg DISTANCE FROM THE SUN: 141.6 million miles It isn't to say that we haven't found water on Mars, ju...
We see plenty of seasonal variation on Earth, due to the large axial tilt, but the Earth follows an almost perfectly circular orbit, so we don't get much variation as a result of that. What if we ...
I'm working on a world where the human race lives on a planet that is much closer to its star than Earth is. The temperatures range from 150C to 300C in the day and below 0C at night. My question...
After traveling a long long time, your spaceship is finally entering into the gravitational sphere of influence of a Sun-like star. Your captain would now like to move from the Oort-like cloud dist...
Could two planets in the same solar system sustain life? I have one world that is about the size of our own planet. The other planet is farther away from the first planet think of it like Mars but ...
Imagine, if you will, an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sol-like star. Now imagine that, from somewhere outside the solar system, a rogue planet, rocky and of roughly the same size and mass of the f...
If there's a habitable planet that orbits two suns like the above orbital route, what would possibly occur on that planet? Would it have two yearly seasonal cycle (compare to earth)? Would it be...
The animal I envision is very protective over its planet. It goes out into space and eats anything that gets close to it. To do this, the animal can float through space, and leave/re-enter the atmo...
The coldest place in the universe that we have observed is in the Boomerang Nebula. Similarly to a refrigerator, heat is carried away through a fluid, resulting in a space colder than the surroundi...
Assumptions: We have materials that can withstand the temperatures/pressures/acidity of Venus. We can get to Venus and back reasonably easily (NASA does shuttles every 3 months). Here is Venus:...
