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In recent years, we have discovered exoplanets that defy our traditional perspectives on how planets work. WASP-17b is twice as wide as Jupiter, yet half as massive, probably because of its orbita...
66 million years ago, a space bomb ten kilometers, or six miles, wide raced through the atmosphere at 20 kilometers per second and landed on the Gulf of Mexico at an angle of 90 degrees. The resul...
A targeted hard-science spin-off from this question: In a tidally-locked planet that rotates about a barycentric point that's located outside of its own sphere, what would the coriolis forces be l...
In my setting, a permanent "fog" hangs over the ocean. It is thick, granting low visibility to anyone within it. Instead of water droplets, however, this fog would consist of some substance or comb...
Bob the time traveler has a problem. He went to 75,000,000 BC to get some dinosaur eggs (don't ask) and his time machine re-combobulator broke and a big chunk is missing. Fortunately he can still ...
Currently writing a scifi novel and am trying to do the math to establish time frame of the lore. The main points are that in 2068 CE Earth sent a generation ship to colonize Proxima Centauri. They...
Today I visited a two hours long organ concert (man, it was amazing) and weird idea have popped up in my head: organ powered by steam instead of pressurized air. This also made me thinking that it ...
I'm working on a story involving humans looking for another habitable planet, and I have been scouring the net for days, finding lots of info on varying levels of oxygen and nitrogen, but none that...
I've read all the related questions on here and as far as I can tell this should be breathable on my planet Liskuel, which has 1.5 bars of pressure. However, I'm really bad at maths and don't reall...
My (your) goal is to melt several tons of snow and ice in a small area using electromagnetic radiation beamed down from a spacecraft in orbit. The atmosphere that's in the way is vaguely Earth-like...
The black hole question reminded me of an idea I wanted to implement at some point in a space campaign, but didn't go forward with because I was unsure whether it's merely statistically very implau...
What sort of force would a railgun need to produce to have a measurable affect on the trajectory of a large spacecraft? In the scifi book I am working on the primary craft of the story is a milita...
For certain reasons I decided to not set my story on Earth. However, the planet is meant to host an Earth-like biosphere (including humans, most of Earth's species (perhaps some that didn't evolve ...
In the DC comic book universe, the Vega System is a solar system around the star Vega (Alpha Lyrae), which is depicted as having dozens of habitable planets. While it seems to be an implausibly lar...
Consider current level technology - surveillance satellites, patrol boats, coastal guards, both USA and Russian anti-submarine jet aircraft patrolling skies of Arctic Sea. I have a big group (~100...
The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, hypothesises that all electrons and positrons are actually manifes...
I want to beam into solid concrete as a bomb. I have transporters and unlike Star Trek I'm not afraid to use them. Terrorists have taken the tech and have nasty plans for us. The bomb is 1 kg sphe...
We actually today have programs to keep an eye out for various rocks in space that may hit Earth. It's a common sci-fi trope that when one is on course to hit us, we deflect it. That's pretty muc...
Suppose someone dropped a black hole into our lovely Sun a few million years ago. It was big enough (far bigger than that) from the start to eat matter faster than radiating it away, and kept growi...
After reading the following question, I know that there are not that many solutions to the 3-body problem, and I know that a ternary system is unstable. The 3 stars all orbit each other in a rotati...
I want to launch the heaviest booster + spaceship possible in about 1.5 of earths gravity, using the technology we currently have. To make things easier, imagine there was the same atmosphere as on...
What would it look like if a human (with the proper protection) walked across a lava stream? Assume that 'proper protection' means some way of insulating against the heat so that they don't get...
Sadly, the asteroid belt isn't the place to showoff your ace pilot skills. It is so sparse you wouldn't even see an asteroid most of the time if you flew through it. But Saturn's rings! The rings ...
On the earth today most animals use a two sex mating system where male and female provide the same amount of genetics to the resulting offspring, despite the fact that in many cases the female prov...
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 ...
