Posts tagged orbital-mechanics
Without tidal locking, would it be possible to have a planet with a region roughly the shape and size of the USA and Canada in which it is always "day"? (By day I mean at least as bright as a clear...
I've been doing a little research (including reading Howard Curtis' Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students) because I want to build a solar system with a planet that has a true three-dimensiona...
I'm trying to make a trinary star system but I'm not sure how it would work. The primary star is an M0Ve star (red dwarf flare star). The orbits of the other two stars are slightly more complicated...
I'm aware that 'tatooine' worlds don't make good habits for planets, normally. From what I've read, either a planet has to orbit one star really closely, or orbit both stars from a really long dist...
I was reading up a little while ago about Janus and Epimetheus and how every few years they trade orbits. The mechanics is interesting but I'm not going into them here. What I was wondering is ...
Let me clarify on the title, because this is important. In recent years, people have been feeling less comfortable calling the only natural satellite orbiting Earth a moon. It may not be the larg...
Background: I have an icy moon on a collision course with my fantasy world. Mages on this world have the ability to slow the speed of the moon gradually. I want them to use this power to lock the m...
My planet - let's call it Penumbra for now - exists at roughly 1.5 AU from it's sun - which was similar to Earth's - but is about a billion years older. It is 15% more massive than Earth, but near...
So, imagine a team of space marines, fighting some sort of space bug zombies on a planet's moon. Things are going pretty bad for them, and the last surviving protagonists are running for their live...
Building on this question: Settings formed by Uncontrolled Terraforming of Venus and Mars via Portals My government, the Great Council of Duhurang1 has authorized the Minister of Astronomic Scienc...
My planet, is roughly as big as Earth, but has two moons. The first moon, Luna, is essentially the same as Earth's moon, but the second, much, much smaller moon, Selene, actually orbits Luna. Sele...
Imagine two identical planets planet A and planet B, orbiting the same star. Is it possible that these two planets follow the exact same "route" as they orbit their sun, but are just distant enoug...
In this question, it's pointed out that the L3 Lagrange point, where a "true" Counter-Earth would lie, is in fact unstable, and over time any object there would drift into a different orbit. Obvio...
In a short sci-fi story i am writing, Earth has a shadow twin. A planet with the same chemical/geological characteristics as Earth and wildlife very similar (but different species because evolution...
I am drafting a short story about a small object orbiting the Sun at the precise 'speed' as Earth's opposite the Sun, undiscovered by us due to its position. The problems I see with this include t...
There are various questions about the stability of multiple moons, how they affect tides and so on, but I don't think this one has been covered here: If my planet has two moons, assuming they have...
A habitable planet with multiple moons, only one of which is tidally locked to the planet: is this general scenario possible? I understand that tidal locking takes a very long time to happen. So ...
I've heard several schools of thought. From a hard science standpoint, could there be gravity on the habitable surface of a Dyson Swarm plate? I keep thinking no. But if the outer shell were to b...
I have a tidally locked planet on a circular orbit, with an axial tilt of 22.5° That means one side is always in the sun, the other one in the shade. The subsolar point moves along a north-south l...
Just how gravitationally flat are real Lagrange Points? Many classic "jump drives" require "flat space" in order to fire, the classic diagram of Lagrange Points as shown below suggests ridges or pl...
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...
Before we begin, two things. This question was inspired by this one. I definitely don't want this to happen. So, I have two very close tidally locked planets, each fills up about 2/3 of the sky of...
I have a planet in earth's solar system that is on a comet's orbit rather than like the orbits of the planets we have. I need some help picturing how this would work to meet a few requirements for ...
I'm making a simple planetary system with a primary similar to our sun and a planet like our earth. This earth analog has a moon similar to our moon, just smaller and closer. How do I calculate ...
I have four similarly-sized planets (5000-6000km radii) all in circular orbits 10 million km apart (i.e. 300M, 310M, 320M and 335M km from the sun respectively). They are 0.37, 0.61, 0.64 and 0.83 ...
So I am building a tidally locked world, but I want the shadow zone to vary a bit. One way to achieve this is through axial tilt. A planet with orbital period = day period, so tidally locked and 0...
I'm envisioning a series of moons in orbit of a super-earth (ideal) or gas giant. If technically workable, the super-earth would have earthlike gravity, the mass and size aren't important. If it's ...
Is there some astronomical / physics reason why it would (or would not) be realistic to have more than one "larger-than-Earth-moon" object in an alien sky as backdrop to a movie or tv show? In oth...
In our story's universe, a solar system is hand-crafted by a deity with seven smallish bodies working in a way that I can only describe as Lagrangian Points, where all planets have the same orbital...
I'm trying to work out what the sky looks like on an Earth-like moon, in particular the length of day and apparent size of the other celestial bodies: the gas giant's size, the gas giant's other mo...
So to keep this simple, imagine a planet much like ours, orbiting a star. For the sake of this example, let's give the planet a 24 hour rotation, and a 364 day orbit around the star. Now, this pla...
This is a purely hypothetical question but I can't find a satisfactory answer to it. Let's say somehow Jupiter collects enough mass to be considered a brown dwarf. Let's assume Jupiter achieves a...
And I mean only making the moon orbit the Earth faster: no change in distance from Earth required. Is such a thing possible?
If a Kardashev Type III alien civilization wanted to monitor the earth (and its inhabitants' progress) via a satellite/orbiting object, how would they realistically transmit data from this object? ...
So, I've got a planet that's basically a junkyard. It's just one big junkyard. People from various space-faring societies dump all the crap there that they don't want to deal with. Derelict spacesh...
To clarify, I realised that I kind of ran into a problem trying to check the orbital stability of two fictional planets in orbit around the real life 61 Cygni binary star star system. To explain...
Yesterday while Green, Andy and I were recording new episodes for the podcast we stumbled upon a bit of a problem that we need someone with physics/astronomy knowledge to help out with. We want to...
As many here likely know, one of the factors that make both Mars and Venus uninhabitable to humans are their lack of a magnetosphere to keep solar winds out. In the setting I am working on, I want...
Bryan Konietzko (you know, one of the guys being Avatar The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra), is working on a new project called Threadworlds, which takes place in a solar system that has 5 ...
I'm trying to design a world in the Alcyone A system of the Pleiades. Alcyone A consists of three stars. The main star is 3.4-3.8 solar masses. There is a very low mass star < 15 million miles ...
I am attempting to create fictional, stable P-Type binary system, featuring a gas giant in a stable orbit, with a habitable Earth-like moon. "Is a Jupiter-sized planet plausible in a habitable zone...
One of the worlds I'm building has three moons in 1:2:4 resonance, with the full moons syncing up once a cycle, meaning all three are full at different times but at the same time when the moon with...
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'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...
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...
(This question is not about getting scrap metal out of orbit and recycling it: please see the second and third sections of the question text.) Consider an object which was not designed for, or ha...
In this situation, humans have used ships to colonize other worlds very distant from ours but still maintain a interplanetary equivalent of our World Wide Web. These future humans have not yet disc...
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...
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,...
