Posts tagged astronomy
I realize that creating worlds with multiple moons and/or suns is risky, but I'm toying with an idea to see where it goes. So, a planet has 3 moons. One is large like ours, the second is about half...
I am aware of being a newbie in the field I am asking my question... please be kind and explain what I did wrong if I make a mistake. The idea from where the problem bloom I love worldbuilding. W...
In the story of my video game, I want a group of colonists to land at dawn on an alien planet and have to terraform or build protective structures before sundown (several earth days). I want the d...
Let us assume a sufficiently earth-like moon, like Europa. It orbits a gas giant. The whole setup is within the star's goldilocks zone, so the moon is theoretically habitable. 'Day' is one rotatio...
I have created a planet called Betiler. I don't want Betiler to be in a classic space system like a star and some planets. So I put it around a white hole called Phulom. In my world, wormhole doesn...
I am trying to construct a standing stone calendar for my world Jasmi, located at latitude 53.8 degrees South. To do this, I need the hour angle of moonrise and moonset for my world. The problem is...
For the purpose of this post, full spectrum means a non-trivial number of frequencies within a non-trivial band. So human eyes aren't full spectrum within the visual range (each cone is wide band, ...
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...
Cosmology since Einstein makes it clear that it's not quite right to say one body in space "revolves around" another, right? Einstein wrote: "The two sentences, 'the sun is at rest and the earth mo...
From what I've read, planets orbiting red dwarf stars would most likely be tidally locked. Under what circumstances might this change? For example, if a planet had been the recipient of some kind o...
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...
If the central Milky Way contained a highly active, accreting quasar, with a steady luminosity of 100 trillion solar that is 27,000 lightyears away and became active 27,000 years ago (the emissions...
I would like to know how possible/plausible it is that any space agency could spot an object larger than our sun, that doesn't reflect light, heading towards us in time to give us somewhere around ...
It's come to my attention that I asked my original question all kinds of wrong. I gave a bad example and I didn't give enough important story details. I've also realized I didn't even ask the quest...
I've been thinking of using a binary model (a planet that rotates around two suns) for a possible story. The specific model is a S-type planetary system, where the planet orbits the the primary st...
Self-explanatory. After my previous question about a sextenary star system and a black hole, I decided to dial back to just two parent stars and a planet. How close could they be if we in the real ...
I'm trying to build a world that is orbiting a red giant but sustains life similarly to the conditions of earth.Since red giants are about half the temperature (3000 kelvin) of our sun (6000 kelvin...
So I have some worlds with different physics, and need some way to explain it. As with other sci-fi, it would seem best to find something plausible but may be extremely unlikely or have negligible ...
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...
So I decided to revive an old project which I was seeking assistance a year ago on the realism of the worldbuilding. WB links from the past: Reality of a tidally locked planet and Slowly Sculpting...
BACKGROUND The world I'm designing currently has a gas giant of the type known as a hot Jupiter orbiting close to the sun and causing solar flares. I would like the inhabitants of my Earth-like wo...
My planet Jasmi is 0.602 MEarth and, according to the wonderful u/shagomir's Planet Calculator Pro spreadsheet, I need to retain enough gas for just over 5 atm of pressure at sea level for a suitab...
I need to heat my planet and I've decided that the two most plausible and controllable ways to do so are by increasing the amount of bombardment by meteoroids from a nearby asteroid belt, and by ti...
I'm writing a science fiction story based on: turning Jupiter into a star. colliding Callisto and/or Io into Ganymede to increase mass and changing the orbit to provide warmth, atmosphere, and r...
Could a planet's axial tilt change a meaningful amount (what is needed to make inhospitable biomes even more inhospitable: hotter dry hot desert, colder north) over an extremely short period (~100 ...
I'm building a very small homeworld (0.602 M$_e$) with a very large moon (0.0711 M$_e$) that orbit each other at a barycenter about 7.12 planetary radii (1 R = 0.870 R$_e$) from the primary's cente...
I'm looking for a science based answer based on current technology. Given that we do commit some small amount of resources and time to searching for stellar objects, with our current technology, ho...
Many factors in history have contributed to society's taking a long time to accept the heliocentric (= the Earth orbits the Sun) model: the first that come to mind immediately are religion and, mor...
I'm working on a story set in a planet of permanent dusk/dawn, and with a dark side that never sees the light of sun. I know that a planet tidally locked to its star would (roughly) look like this,...
Edit: Before I give up on this I wonder how could an advanced civilization create conditions on a small planetoid (Ceres sized?) to keep an Earth level breathable atmosphere? It seems like its impo...
Suns are stars. They are orbited by planets, and sometimes other stars. Planets are orbited by moons. Reasonably advanced civilizations may launch artificial satellites into orbits around their pla...
(Warning: do not try this at home-system) Preamble Hello humans, we need advice. Let's say we have just successfully defeated and killed a Horror From Beyond Reason who happened to be multiple t...
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...
Say you have a planet and the planet has a moon: could the moon have visible satellites as well? I don't mean a gas giant planet, I mean something habitable by humanoids or humans. Will the moon'...
If a star had a Dyson ring of some kind around it, such that to the naked eye the star wouldn't dim at all, how long would it take a civilization to reasonably see and understand the Dyson swarm, a...
Mars has an inactive mantle and core and thus little magnetosphere to speak of. Assume that a lunar mass object is placed in Mars orbit at 300,000 kilometers out (one light-second). Given the tidal...
So I'm guessing you guys know about the speculation that life exists on Titan. To me, this is very interesting but many point out that it would probably only be microbes and unicellular life becaus...
I'm making five habitable planets the size of earth as moons for a gas giant the size of Jupiter. Then I want to add many more smaller moons, Our Jupiter has 67 moons, I want as many small moons...
For us earthlings, the concept of "year" came from the observation that the Sun reaches a minimum and a maximum span in the rise-set path in the sky. On a planet experiencing extreme perihelion p...
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...
Under what conditions would a planet's night sky look like this to the human eye? The angular speed of the stars relative to the planet would need to be high enough for the stars to blur into th...
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...
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 ...
My story opens with an old man who arrives at his "personal" asteroid somewhere out in space. When he arrives, everything is powered down and he has to bring systems online before he can take his s...
I create a world having three moons. Since precession cycle is influenced by our moon, how do I calculate the duration of the cycle with three moons? Thanks
After seeing this question, I wondered what weapon of choice (and, logically, the grand scale of energy amount) is needed to shatter the moon. Let's take our moon, the Moon, the natural satellite o...
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...
Let's say that something horrible has happened and a Mars-sized planet is knocked out of orbit and is hurtling towards an Earth-sized planet. How much time will they have? How will this affect the ...
First of all, I'd like to make a disclaimer, and that is that I'm in a brainstorming phase as of now so this question will be generally vague. This also means that any ideas you're willing to propo...