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Q&A

How can I get a habitable moon of a gas giant to cool once it is in the planet's shadow?

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I'm currently heavily revising a story which is largely set on a habitable but not exactly hospitable moon of a gas giant orbiting on the outer edge (or just beyond) of the habitable zone around a Sun-like star. I should note that the moon is not naturally habitable - it was terraformed in the distant past, and its ecosystem is a very simple engineered one.

For plot purposes, I need the moon to support unaided human life but get very cold very quickly when it passes into the gas giant's shadow and ideally stay this way for a day or two by Earth's standards. I've tried to research what factors might allow this to happen - distance to primary, the primary's diameter, inclination, atmospheric density, size of the moon, ocean coverage, cloud layers and so on but I've not been able to find a consistent answer.

How can I design this moon so that it is habitable but will get cold enough quickly enough to pose a significant threat to human life every time it enters the primary's shadow?

There is supposed to be little in the way of inclination so the eclipses are fairly regular events.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/12506. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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