Posts tagged planets
If an earth-like planet was slowed down to very nearly match its orbital period, so that instead of being tidally-locked to its star, the planet effectively had an immensely long day. Akin to Mercu...
First, a little background information. For the purpose of my story, I'm making the Earth uninhabitable, similar to this question. This is to cause a mass exodus from the solar system through a bit...
Globular clusters are old, dense groups of stars that tend to have relatively few metals (in this case meaning any elements heavier than helium). Clusters near the galactic core tend to have more m...
Adhering to natural laws and physics as much as possible[1], what could cause Venus to go from a habitable planet to its current state, and how long would it take from the apocalyptic event to achi...
I'm looking for various factors; Atmosphere Composition, Type of Sun, etc, whatever would work. That is, of course, if this is even likely/possible. I believe that yellow is generally not an ideal ...
I hope this isn't too broad. I would like an Earth-like planet for November's NaNoWriMo that is just enormous, but plausible. Then I started to get into material composition, proximity to the sta...
If there is a planet whose atmosphere consists of : 30% methane 70% oxygen Then, can we land on it? If yes, then how, and why would it not explode? Also, can such a planet exist for a long time?
There is a planet that is orbiting around not a single star, but the core of a galaxy. It is independent of the other solar systems in the galaxy, but is affected by the center of mass of the core....
So, I've got a planet with this atmosphere. The composition is: 60% NO 20% NO2 10% N2O 5% N2 5% O2 traces of CO, CO2. The surface pressure is 0.7 atm, temperatures range from -30 to +30 degree...
My binary terrestrial planets are roughly the size of earth and they are tidally locked with one another. They are 12,000 miles (19,312 km) apart. That distance is based off of this article, http:/...
I'm creating a fictional planet that orbits a gas giant (a lot like Jupiter). I'm working out all the issues listed here and here. But what I'm really having trouble with is the size of the tide. ...
In my fictional world I have selected all parameters to maximize the Hills Sphere of my planet. The planet has three times Earth's mass and it is located in 2 AU from its star that's 1.4 times more...
In the Mass Effect series there's a terrestrial planet called Dekuuna with 10 times the mass of Earth, a surface gravity of 4G and a native intelligent race. I was just wondering if it was possible...
Most of the planets that we know of have a sidereal day (rotational period) that is shorter or on the same order of magnitude as their sidereal year (orbital period), the latter being the case in t...
For most of us, meteors are by far the ultimate planet killers. All it takes is one direct hit to suddenly wipe all life from the face of a world. But, rather than taking life away from a planet, w...
Would it be possible to move Ganymede into Mars' orbit causing them to fuse together like the two proto moons of earth? The new planet "Marmede" would have a mass equal to 13.2 % of Earth. Ho...
I've got a planet with a very special atmosphere. The properties are as follows: Surface pressure = 0.7 atm Composition: 60% NO 20% NO2 10% N2O 5% N2 5% O2 traces of CO, CO2 My question is: ...
We all know that Titan has an atmosphere that consists mainly of N2. What I want to have is a planet with an atmosphere that consists mainly of various nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2, N2O). My question...
Okay. I have been piecing together the elements of another story for my school PDF newspaper (we publish one to a wiki page every two days). Yesterday I asked this question on whether a second habi...
This creature is a waterdweller that somewhat resemble a fish. It lives in the retreating oceans of a planet orbiting a star that is reaching its red giant stage. The planet is now experiencing ver...
Is it safe to assume that any two binary planets of 0.5 to 1.5 Earth masses having mass ratios of 1:1 up to 2:1 would always have become tidally locked to one another long before any life could nat...
Assuming that the sky isn't that color because of excess pollution, would the makeup of the atmosphere need to change? And if it were breathable, would the necessary position and color of the sun ...
Is there a way to either counteract the effect of gravity on a planetary scale or create a planet with a low enough density so as to replicate the effect of weightlessness? My world takes place o...
Imagine a SupraWorld being built around a gas giant like Jupiter. To have a 1g gravity on the surface the resulting SupraWorld would have to be less than twice the radius of the giant (my calculati...
I'm writing a setting for some fantasy novels, and came up with an idea about weather and climate. The world I'm imagining has an elliptical orbit around a binary system, giving it basically 2 st...
The Wikipedia article on Klemperer Rosettes states that hexagonal rosettes are slightly more stable than other, non-hexagonal rosettes, due to the position of the orbital objects in the Lagrange po...
I know that by definition, a desert implies a lack of water and, as such, makes it very hard for living things to survive there. In the story I'm writing, the characters come across a planet that ...
I know that on a binary planet you would have planetary eclipses (basically like a solar or lunar eclipse but with planets instead of moons). If there also is a moon, things would be much more comp...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Split out from this question since it was too large. I'm designing an exoplanetary system that was the victim of a drive-by super-Jupiter ejected from a nearby supernova that crashed into the syst...
I've come up with a couple of exoplanets for a story, and have reached the limits of my knowledge. I've googled around, and I had a space enthusiast friend look at them, but he freely admits that h...
Recently there have been up to two habitable planets discovered around the star TRAPPIST-1, if animal life was able to evolve on either planets how would eyesight evolve under such a dim star? How ...
My space colonists have found a home in the ring system of a (maybe chthonian) gas giant. The rings are based on Saturn's in terms of appearance, but can they be made of gases or liquid (maybe drop...
According to this Reddit conversation, the detritus around a planet tends to form into a single plane located around the equator given enough time. How long does this process take? Suppose a planet...
What is the minimum size of a planet that could harbor human life? You get to decide what the atmosphere is, but I'm reasonably sure that O2, CO2, and H2O are necessary components of the atmosphere...
I'm trying to come up with a scenario involving a mining base built on a planet that may only be approached from the shadowed side; the star (or other body) allows only that narrow lane of approach...
Because elements are classified by the number of protons they have, could there potentially be planets or environments that are so dense that they are made up of elements potentially greater than U...
I am trying to build a world which has a bit larger gravity force than earth, 1.25g. And I was wondering which impact could this have on its geology and life evolution. I think that with a higher ...
Everybody, even those who are complete beginners in the field of Astronomy, know Io, the cryovolcanic moon of Jupiter that looks like a burned pizza with skin cancer. Volcanoes constantly spit out ...
I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the assum...
A few days ago, I was roaming around Wikipedia and came across something, this comet came extremely close to Mars for astronomical standards recently. I'm also working on a science fiction univer...
Suppose we had reached the moon and found it to be habitable. It was big enough to support an atmosphere, albeit a thinner one than the Earth has, and at some point in the past few hundred million ...
Suppose a planetary system works in such a way that there is a rotating planet in the direct centre of a binary star (the star system's centre of gravity, also known as barycenter), such that the t...
I am working on a novel of a fantasy world on another planet. I am not too concerned with scientific accuracy, as again, it's fantasy, but I am not interested in supernatural things for my world. T...
After writing this question about the ecology of a terraformed planet, I realized that I hadn't quite tied up all the loose ends of the terraforming process itself. I intended for a group of aliens...
I remember a cartoon about some spy guy. In that cartoon they did mass media by projecting from the surface of the earth to the moon in the night sky. Would that technique be possible? Could an e...
As the title says... What would be the effect to earth or an oceanic planet if it lacks the presence of Radioactive Elements in its crust and mantle. Also can you explain what would happen if we d...
I've been designing a world and wanted to base it on a rather interesting cosmology proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Philolaus. He was a very early opponent of geocentrism, believing that ...
This is inspired by a comment by JDÅ‚ugosz. Planets change their angular velocity when they orbit stars because they follow Keplerian orbits with (typically) non-zero eccentricity. The bottom line...
I'm working on the setting for a fictional story I'm writing and I wanted to inquire as to how possible massive-Universe-sized planets are radius: 5.0x10^30M, without me having to re-make the laws ...
