Astronomy on a maximally spinning Earth
Let there be an earth-sized planet with a rotational period of just over 3 hours and 38 minutes described by David Hammen here . On this oblate spheroid, with nights lasting for an hour and 49ish minutes, would the observational skills of an alien Galileo be diminished or enhanced? What advantages or disadvantages would it pose? Would heliocentrism be harder or easier to defend?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/36292. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Astronomy would be harder because the period when it was really dark would be pretty short. Much shorter than the 1:19 between sun down and sun up. It wouldn't be impossible, since you could just aim the scope and wait another 3 hours for it to get dark again. It would take a bit of patience, but it would also have an advantage of not needing to happen when others are sleeping, since any kind of sleep cycle longer than a nap might take several days.
So you could get up whenever, do some stuff around the house, go out at dark and make your observations, go work on some other stuff, go out and make observations, and so on until bed time.
I'm not really sure that heliocentrism would be affected either way. The same problem arises... how to prove the Earth orbits the Sun, and not the other way around?
The biggest thing that would have made this a moot question is if either Mars or Venus had a large moon like Luna, since something like that would be visible to the naked eye early on.
A fast orbit just proves that the sun is in a big hurry to get around the earth, but nothing more.
On a side note, if this planet had a tilt like Earths, the best observatories would be located closer to or maybe at the poles, in order to take advantage of the longer nights this would provide
0 comment threads
0 comment threads