Timeline for How to reignite a sun?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31, 2022 at 20:16 | vote | accept | Nutter4ever | ||
| Aug 31, 2022 at 18:22 | comment | added | Willk | @RobWatts - I agree that would be the case if the planet were at any distance from the ring. If the planet were right on the edge of the ring it might be thick enough to shade the whole planet. Prior art: worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/102441/… | |
| Aug 31, 2022 at 17:55 | comment | added | Rob Watts | I don't think this could work in a conventional universe. For the star to "go out", the dust cloud would have to be a cylinder nearly as tall as the star itself. However, gravity makes rings, not cylinders. Even a completely opaque ring would leave enough of the star above and below the ring that the dimming would likely only be noticeable with fairly precise measurements. | |
| Aug 9, 2022 at 21:24 | comment | added | Yakk | It would be really hard for a solar system to capture a rogue Jupiter near the Roche limit, and not mess up the orbits of any Goldilocks zone rocky planets. | |
| Aug 9, 2022 at 18:59 | comment | added | Ray | @Nohbdy Perhaps it isn't the gas giant that gets torn up, but rather the combination of gravitational forces from the sun and one or two gas giants messes up the orbit of a rocky planet and sends it below its Roche limit. Perhaps the orbit of the rock occasionally passes near the gas giant, and on average, it loses orbital energy in these encounters a bit more often than it gains it, such that over a billion years or so, the orbit decays far enough to bring it below the limit. Alternately, the orbit eventually gets close enough to the giant that it's thrown into a highly elliptical orbit. | |
| Aug 9, 2022 at 16:20 | comment | added | user8827 | @Chronocidal, sure. I'm just making sure I understand the setup of the scenario. | |
| Aug 9, 2022 at 15:58 | comment | added | Chronocidal | @Nohbdy It doesn't have to be a stable planet that gets torn apart; it might be a rogue planet that passes through the system, gets captured, and is subsequently torn apart. | |
| Aug 8, 2022 at 3:27 | comment | added | user8827 | I forgot about those. But they can't originate too near their Roche limit, right? They'd get scattered during early planetary evolution. A cursory literature check says we're still establishing the lower limit of how close to the limit they will form, and we've found at least one only 20% percent out from it's Roche limit. On the face of it at least, sufficient acceleration to bring one of these monsters in range of tidal death would require spooky action or catastrophic amounts of energy. The existence of the planet itself suggests a stable system. | |
| Aug 8, 2022 at 2:26 | comment | added | Willk | @Nohbdy - here is how : en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter | |
| Aug 7, 2022 at 21:21 | comment | added | user8827 | Upvoted, and it still leaves a massive mystery as to how a formed planet somehow got anywhere near it's roche limit. Especially considering the formation of such a monstrous gas giant shouldn't have occurred anywhere inside the orbit of a habitable rocky planet. | |
| Aug 7, 2022 at 14:40 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | Nice answer, solves both the re-birth problem and the even harder "sun died" problem with no hand-waving and a minimum of coincidence. | |
| Aug 7, 2022 at 11:46 | comment | added | tylisirn | Quick back of the envelope calculation suggest this could envelope the sun with something on the order of 1 000 kg/m^2 to 100 000 000 kg/m^2 layer of dust if the broken up planet is the size of Jupiter, depending on how close the belt will be. The higher end would make quite thick dust belt - very close to the sun (few solar radii). | |
| Aug 6, 2022 at 20:02 | history | answered | Willk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |