Posts tagged planets
In my last question about methods of deflecting a rogue planet, there was a fascinating answer from Willk. Willk basically suggested that if you knew the location, mass and velocity of objects in ...
I want to have a two-world binary planet system where both have intelligent life, orbiting a single star. The two planets are assumed to be tidally locked to each other and orbit each other every 3...
Apart from the obvious difference that liquid ammonia needs a much colder temperature than liquid water (but ammonia-based life forms wouldn't feel that as particularly cold), what would be the mos...
If there was a life-supporting planet that was cubical rather than spherical, would it be feasible for there to be a unique but similar civilisation on each 'Plane'? I know that cube planets are i...
Could humanity move a planet such as Jupiter by forcing it to vent its gas? Assuming we have the technology to do huge mining operations and use these to make some of Jupiter's moons into a huge t...
I'd just like to preface this with the fact that I'm super new and I apologise if this has been discussed in some way previously (I have looked at similar topics but they haven't quite given me the...
Suppose that both Earth and Mars was booming with life in a similar way. Except that, on Earth, there was no hominid family, and no humans evolved. Instead, humans evolved on Mars. Assuming we ha...
This is a reality check: I want a planet with huge forests and a relatively (to Earth) high level of CO2, but I also want there to be very large areas of grassland, (savannahs) where we naturally e...
Imagine a small planet, rich with iron, but with a negligible atmosphere, mostly devoid of oxygen. Once harvested, how could iron ore be smelted and refined into iron? And would the ore itself be d...
I'm working on a story about Earth or an Earth like planet with current or very near future levels of civilisation and technology drifting or speeding out of the solar system. Currently my method f...
Okay, trying to figure out this math guys! This may be simple math to some of you, but not me!!! I googled various ways of asking this question and got some good results, but I'm looking for a sim...
My planet is a frozen world. Roughly the size of earth and in a perpetual ice age. The planet has very cold temperatures at night and during the day its surface becomes very bright. The intense sol...
Okay, as an extension of my previous question, I'm just going to lay bare all the details I've written down about this planet (including corrections from my last question), and ask the big question...
So I have the following scenario for a story, and I want to know if it runs into any ridiculous no-nos from a scientific point of view: There is an earth-like world orbiting a red dwarf (similar t...
I have a planet orbiting a red dwarf and, as expected, it is tidally locked to its star. I know that these planets will have a very significant temperature difference between the diurnal and noctur...
It's a major step forward for humanity when they can finally live on a new planet. Maybe they went there out of desperation to survive, or maybe they simply want to explore. Either way, they sudden...
In my universe, humans nuked themselves in a war so thoroughly that the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. As a result, they have to leave Earth and find a new home. They briefly tried to settl...
On Earth the planet's magnetic poles line up fairly well with the geographic poles. This makes things like navigation very straightforward as all compasses point to (roughly) the north pole. How...
I have a planet covered with a large shallow ocean, which extends over most of its surface. I want to turn this planet into a great desert, specifically a salty desert (the salts of this desert are...
Far, far away from the Earth, there is a nebula. An enormous cloud made of 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen and 2% other non-lethal materials. These gases swirl around a star, and the pressure around it is...
Gas giants can generate heat via the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism. It's oft-repeated that Jupiter actually generates more heat internally via this method than it receives from the Sun. Scale this mec...
For this question, the word 'metals' does not refer to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It instead refers to metals as defined by the periodic table of elements. After researching the ab...
Wikipedia states: "Electromagnetic or magnetic induction is the production of an electromotive force (i.e., voltage) across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field." This one ...
My planet is frequently set with thick fog. What is the best way to have its residents see accurately? One species called Hell Fires fall from the sky, landing on top of prey and killing it. How...
Although a question about how large a living thing could be has been asked and answered, would a being such as Mogo from DC's Green Lantern series be possible? Mogo is the size of Earth roughly ...
For this question, I was inspired by the following image of the "Jupiter Abyss": What I want to know is, can a Jupiter-like gas giant have thousands of giant black storms, kind of like what I've...
The planet is huge roughly four times the size of earth, with lots of hydrogen in its atmosphere (group A water in Hydrogen out, B water out.) it is also very humid. what do I do to have giant Stor...
I read this and wonder now, what if we would introduce a new planet to our solar system; would the force of gravitation demand a similar plane as that of the other planets? Mercuries 6.3° indica...
One popular theory to explain how Earth got its water is that it was delivered by asteroid/comet/etc. The form this theory usually takes is that many small impacts occured over a long time, each d...
I'm making a Region of a planet with very high humidity, mostly covered in fog at ground level. I am open to having seasonal changes and would like there to be a few sunny days lets say 1 out of 15...
The idea of a planet where ammonia replaces water as the dominant liquid in the environment is quite popular in science fiction. I tried to develop a scenario where these kind of oceans are plausib...
Thanks for taking a moment to help me understand the feasibility of this scenario. Essentially, what I am looking at is an Earth-like world that would be between 1.3x and 1.6x the mass of our own ...
Far in the future technology has evolved to the point that humanity is able to try and terraform something in our solar system. The moon is out, since it's too close to earth and therefore to risk...
I would like a planet that's a tropical paradise on one side but covered in ice and glaciers on the opposite side, whether it be the Southern-Northern or the Western-Eastern hemisphere. I know it...
Is it possible for a planetary body to have a secondary axis of rotation? For example let's say there's an Earth-like body that is spinning with its North Pole facing the Sun. Imagine that the Nort...
One proposed type of desert planet is one in which the equator and the "tropics" are harsh, hot deserts, but the polar regions are temperate, habitable, and lush with life. You can see an example o...
If the polar cap of a tidally locked planet was all ocean, what weather patterns would emerge? The ocean couldn't be half frozen/half boiling, right? I need a weather pattern so the planet isn't ju...
Im working on a story about a new exoplanet discovery and its subsequent "Near Future" colonization. The planet is close to its parent star. As such, I have decided to give it a sizeable molten ir...
Now that we know about the electric nature of the cosmos, the question arises: "How much are planets affected by electric forces while moving through the universe?" We have been taught that the mov...
To be able to colonize another world, there are some requirements; the harvesting of energy, enough recourses, handling of the environment (pressure, temperature and gravity and so on) and availabi...
Making a semi-realistic Kirby Alternate Universe (AU) here. Popstar's shape is a result of a member of this powerful race using secret magics to alter reality in this AU. What would its day/night ...
I have a planet similar to Venus(similar size and atmosphere) that has floating continents in the atmosphere due to strong magnetic fields. If it is possible, what would the continents need to be m...
So in theory, I would want this planet to have the same everything as earth besides the radius (and anything that affects how radius plays into gravity). I know the density of this Planet X would h...
I want to build a world that has its geographic poles travel like the Earth magnetic poles do. What is a plausible way to do this? (besides giving it two suns that is)
Background I just read this question about how to get a planet to have one hemisphere with tropical climate and one with polar climate. The (not yet accepted) answer with the highest score recomm...
Hypothetically speaking, if we would find another planet, the size of Earth, with atmosphere as dense as Earth's atmosphere is, and we would insert (in some hypothetical way) nitrogen, oxygen and C...
In my world, ten is an important number that shows up frequently. In the solar system my world belongs to, there are ten other planets beside it, and there are ten months in a year. I know next t...
What I'm using your information for: My planet is small, has a thicker atmosphere than earth and it's orbiting a white dwarf. The main reason I chose it to be a white dwarf is that I read somewher...
I have read many posts about planets in perpetual sunset or twilight. Tidal locking, perpetual sunset at the poles of a planet with zero axis tilt, and so on. Great information by the way. This que...
In my story, there is an Earth-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf, tidally locked to its parent star, with large oceans like Earth, two moons similar to ours and a thick atmosphere to distribute hea...