Can this unique planet be colonized?
In the story I'm writing, a gas dwarf (named Eden) is discovered in a triple star system. Its atmosphere is mainly oxygen and water based, and its gravity is slightly higher than Earth's.
Unlike our gas giants, however, Eden has 2 "surfaces". The upper layer is made up of millions of floating islands hovering just above its cloud layer. (A moon or a passing planet probably broke as it passed Eden and was lock in its magnetic field). Known as the Aether, most of the planet's population lives up here. There are even cities built in the sky that simply hover from the planet's magnetic field.
Far below, however, is an unstable icy crust known as the shell, which is constantly changing due to the forces of the water and oxygen ocean layers below it. Shell quakes and rifts occur on a daily basis here, dramatically changing sections of the Shell in an instant.
Could such a world exist, and am I missing any important details?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/44651. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Here are some jumbled thoughts I had:
There's no way the planet can have a magnetic field strong enough to levitate rocks. In my answer to Can there be planets with extremely strong magnetic fields?, I calculated that for Earth to have a surface magnetic field as strong as a kitchen magnet, it would need to have a magnetic moment stronger than a magnetar, by a factor of about 1.5. You'd need to have an even larger magnetic moment here, because the radius would be bigger because $$B\propto\frac{p}{r^3}$$ where $B$ is the magnitude of the magnetic field, $p$ is the magnetic moment and $r$ is the radius, and also because you would need a stronger magnetic field to levitate the rocks.
This would seem to indicate that the planet cannot be colonized; the cities cannot be built.
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