Timeline for Can the Little Prince's planet actually exist in our universe?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 20, 2020 at 12:54 | comment | added | illustro | @papidave no, because the attractive force of gravity falls off with an R^2 relation. It's heavily dependent on the percentage of the planet's radius you are away from it. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 21:40 | comment | added | papidave | If your handwavium is producing 1g on the surface of the tiny planet, wouldn't that gravity also retain an atmosphere at roughly 760 mmHg (assuming, of course, that the gas to form that atmosphere is available in the first place)? | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 14:09 | history | edited | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fixed typos and a calculation mistake.
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| Jun 19, 2020 at 13:54 | comment | added | Yakk | @JohnDvorak "Somehow", heh. A way to do that sounds much harder than artificial gravity. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 9:00 | comment | added | N. Virgo | @KlausÆ.Mogensen that was my thought exactly. Though, if we're at a tech level where we can put a little black hole or something inside the 'planet' to give it the required density, then we can probably also build a bubble around it to keep the atmosphere in. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 8:42 | comment | added | Klaus Æ. Mogensen | One problem would be how the planet keeps its atmosphere. Our atmosphere is roughly 100 km thick, where the gravity is still very nearly 1 g. At 100 km, this microplanet's gravity is only 1/100.000 g. Even 5 km up - where our atmosphere has dropped off to half pressure - the gravity would be 1/25 g. A lot more air would be needed to provide surface pressure as on Earth, since the weight of a column of air would be far smaller (even though the 'column' would be more of a cone), and the upper parts would be much more likely to be blown off by the solar wind or escape due to molecular motion. | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 8:20 | comment | added | Teleporting Goat | Considering planets can be artificially made, I think perfect roundness isn't a hard requirement (same as clearing its orbit). So the main thing we'd need to care about is gravity. Maybe a handwavium-based gravity generator could do the trick? | |
| Jun 19, 2020 at 6:04 | comment | added | John Dvorak | Ey, that's not bad. So if we carve a small chunk of a brown dwarf and somehow convince it to not expand rapidly immediately, we'll have Little Prince's homeworld in a jiffy. | |
| Jun 18, 2020 at 20:53 | history | answered | HDE 226868♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |