Questions tagged [planetary-rings]
For questions about rings and their effects on the world and its people.
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Reality check: infalling bombardment from rings around Earth, would the planet still be inhabitable?
I'm writing a story where the Moon became a ring.
I've seen plenty of discussion in other questions' comments about feasibility, and how turning the Moon into a ring would cause a true Apocalypse. ...
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Long-term stability for a terrestrial planet with rings and a large sub-synchronous moon
Terrestrial earth-like planet with rings and moon (to scale, this was found in SpaceEngine and I love how it looks).
Rough Luna vs my moon apparent angular size comparison (Luna = 0.52°, my moon = ~4°...
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How could you have a Super Saturn (J1407b) like planet with rings in a system with life?
I would like my world's solar system to have a super saturn (J1407b) like planet with ring system for astrological reasons. How could I have this during a "contemporary age" (Cenozoic ...
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Can a planet with rings support life?
Is it at all possible for complex life to evolve and exist on a planet with rings?
I assume the rings would have to be rock, since if the planet is to support life, it will have to be in the habitable ...
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The Tropic of Ice: how cold might it get in a long-lasting planetary ring shadow?
I am working on my second novel set on a ringed Earth-like planet. Compared to Earth it has a slow orbit (19 Terran years) and a low axial tilt resulting in minimal seasonal variance. The low axial ...
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How would you build RingWorld? [closed]
Larry Niven's RingWorld is supposed to do a complete revolution around its central star in a matter of days: about 9 days, assuming a ring of Earth size orbit, providing a 9.81m/s² "gravity" ...
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Could humanoid life survive the violent formation of a planetary ring system?
The deepest mythological archetypes in my Earth-like world hint at a wondrous and terrible disaster in the ancient past. ~10 tya a celestial body (perhaps a small, second moon, or a wandering asteroid,...
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Tides on an Inhabitable planet with rings
I've occasionally pondered the notion of an inhabited planet similar to Earth in terms of size, gravity, atmosphere etc., but with rings circling around it an a similar manner to Saturn. One question- ...
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What would be the weather inside the rings' shadow of a planet with 0 tilt axis? [closed]
The premise
· super Earth (the super giant part can be nixed if impossible)
· rings system made of silicate, size is still to be determined (but the wider, the better)
· non tilted axis
· there are ...
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How stable would partial planetary rings be on Lagrange points?
Context
There's a comparison to what I'm talking about on a larger scale: Jupiter's got its Trojans and Greeks, and Earth does have them too. Those are more or less loose and sparse groups of ...
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Could a terrestrial planet have a stable orbit of rings? [duplicate]
Planet Phileas, similar in size to Earth. Fourth star in a binary star system with a p-type orbit.
Changes may be necessary and I'm open to constructive criticism. This question includes two parts. ...
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Can a habitable planet have rings? [duplicate]
So, quite simply, is it possible for a planet in the habitable zone of its sun to possess rings like a gas giant? Naturally they would not be made of ice, but if this planet had a small moon which ...
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Debris from a ringed planet, and believability
I am writing a fantasy book, so while I am not too concerned with being completely scientifically accurate, I would at least like for aspects of my world to feel believable, so as to not take the ...
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could an equator-round elevator be possible for passing through rings of a planet to reach the moons?
I am developing a terrestrial, habitable planet with rings about the width of Uranus' rings. Not extremely thick, but still noticeable.
I have heard that rings on planets would cause an inhabitable ...
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What are the Celestial observations and mythology on a ringed planet? [closed]
I'm building a ringed world with it's rings composed of low albedo material to try and dampen the impact the rings have during night time (that is, trying so not every single night that the rings are ...
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How should planetary rings be to cause permanent and heavy thunderstorms on the full equatorial area of the planet?
The world in question is an Earth-like planet, with, for plot reasons, a permanently ongoing thunderstorm all over its equatorial line, in such way that's impossible to come across before a 1920-50-...
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What would an Earth-like planet with a mostly stable ring be like? [closed]
I recently watched a video talking about what would happen if our moon was on a collision course with the Earth and they described it being ripped apart by Earth's gravity. This made me want to re-...
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Verifying Habitability/ Feasibility of my Conworld
Right, lets try this again.
I'm making a planet for a book I'm writing. I want to know if the planet I outline here is scientifically probable, able to support life, and what the climate would ...
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Would my gas giant have rings?
The gas giant in question is about 3 times the mass of jupiter with a density of 3.58 grams per cubic centimeter. It formed naturally beyond the system's forstline and then migrated into the habitable ...
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How advanced would a civilisation need to be to notice one of their system's planets is tidally locked?
Picture a tidally locked planet that is also the closest planet to the star (~0,17 AU from a star with a luminosity of ~1,5 times that of the Sun).
The side of the planet that faces the star would ...
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Habitability of a Low Axial Tilt Planet with a Planetary Ring
So, I'm creating a world for a science fantasy setting. It has magic and such, but since it's mainly taboo to use it, I want the world's climate to be based on hard scientific facts.
My world has an ...
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Age of sail navigation tools for a planet with a ring
Alright so I have a planet where the locals are about seventeenth century level of technology, meaning sailing ships and single shot black powder weapons are the standard and there is plenty of ocean ...
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What's the minimum possible size for a planet to have rings?
How small can a planet with rings be? It doesn't have to be inhabitable, but it must be a planet (not a dwarf planet).
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How Bright Would Super Saturn's Rings Be in Our Sky?
It's not that long ago that we have found the "exoplanet" J1407b, notable for having a ring system 200 times the size of Saturn's. I airquote that term because, at a mass ten to forty times ...
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How long would it take for a earth-based ring to break up given solar and lunar gravitational forces?
In my world-building project, a decades long orbital conflict has resulted in the trashing of Earth's orbit with massive amounts of debris, shipwrecks, and space junk. However, after an anomalous ...
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Are Saturn's rings a safe place for adolescent space-hoppers?
Are Saturn's rings a safe place for adolescent space-hoppers?
As you know, space-hopper toys are based on the real-life creature. These are roughly balloon shaped and have two "horns".
The ...
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Could this uniquely shaped planet exist?
Now, I know that planets can’t be disc-shaped. However, if a relatively small planet had a very strong magnetical pull, could it have a ring system that could make the planet from afar seem disc-...
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How changing planetary ring affects the migration of terrestrial fauna?
Imagine a gas giant as massive as Jupiter has a enormous planetary ring which will expand and contract throughout its orbit around a main sequence star.
Then there is a moon as massive as Mars and ...
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How to make a planet with a chunk missing from it? [closed]
In the forgotten mists of time a Great War was fought. During that war the planet Kutok had a massive gouge (averaging 1,000 miles across and 4,000ft deep) and extending North from the polar cap down ...
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What is a good reason not to mine a planetary ring?
Most planetary rings are rich in water in the form of ice, especially now we are running low on freshwater reserves on Earth. Imagine someone discovered a huge chunk of meteorite consisting of a ...
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Are elliptical rings feasible?
Around a rocky planet or small gas giant, could there be a system of rings that follow an elliptical orbit? I have used a gravity simulator (this one) to test it, but the way it handles its particles ...
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Can adding mass to a ringed planet cause a huge chain reaction?
I've been wondering about this for a while. Here is the research I've done so far that lead me to ask this question:
A planetary ring system is most often formed by the breakup of objects within the ...
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Forming a dust ring around asteroid Ceres
Is it possible, due to asteroid mining activities, for a space-fairing civilization to produce a dust ring around a very large asteroid (Ceres)?
In my world, there is a lot of ore processing being ...
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Implications of cigar-shaped bodies having rings?
In my Conworld's system, There is a porous asteroid large enough to be a dwarf planet (but it's mass is too small to pull it into a spherical shape) that has rings. How they got there, nobody knows. ...
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How to explain planetary rings pulsating?
A spacecraft enters an unnamed system and spotted a gas giant with a pulsating planetary ring, it glows bright intermittently. What natural phenomenon could be responsible for such brilliant display? ...
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Could a Moon have its own "Rings", like Saturn's, without the Host Planet having them? [duplicate]
I'm currently fleshing out a sci-fi universe and always looking for fun new locales to populate it with, and I saw this phenomenon in a video game I've been playing recently, and it made me curious... ...
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How stable would a ring be around a tidally locked planet?
So I am working on my species which I requested help with a few days ago. They are large salamander like creatures that need large bodies of water to survive and the planet they live on has about 80-...
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Rings made out of water? [duplicate]
There have been numerous questions on this site about moons being composed entirely of water. However, is it possible for a planet to have rings made out of water?
I think that the ring would ...
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Compass on a Ringed, Earth-like Planet
Is it necessarily a given that a compass (as they magnetically function on Earth) could be made to function similarly on an alternate, Earth-like, ringed planet?
Another way of asking: is it feasible ...
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How to navigate a ringed planet at night?
I'm working on a story set in an Earth-like world but with rings (say, proportionately similar to Saturn's). I'm trying to get a solid handle on how these rings would affect the sky. For the ...
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Can a planet with chaotic rotation have more than one ring rotating in differents axis? [duplicate]
Let's say that planet earth have a big explosion . An explosion generated in earth big enough to change the planet shape. Making earth having a chaotic rotation like Hyperion leaving water and rocks ...
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weather after the earth gets flooded
tl;dr : the earth has been gradually flooded, over the course of a few hundred years. Also, there are now large lumps or ice raining out of the sky (not very often), causing massive tsunamis.
I have ...
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Ringed Planet: The shadow's effect on fauna
I am writing a fantasy novel centered on an Earth-like planet with icy rings like Saturn. This question deals with certain effects of having such a ring system. Assume the planet is Earth, the rings ...
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Consequences of dark planetary rings?
I am aware of the possible consequences having a planetary ring may cause on a planet, but since I want my nights to be dark and not giant-reflective-curve-in-the-sky bright I've decided to make the ...
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Consequences of a two-mooned system losing the one closest to the planet?
I was thinking of adding rings to my planet and I wanted to give them a proper origin, so I thought about getting rid of the moon closest to the planet since I would still have one and it could make ...
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Is a ring planet possible?
No planet in the center, just a large O shape made up of large chunks of rock that in and of itself itself orbits a sun, as if it were a planet (as distinct from a ringworld). I know most of the time, ...
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What happens if a small moon is held within a planet's Roche Limit?
For story reasons, I need my mages to convert a moon on a collision course with their planet into a ring around the planet. The only thing they can do is hold the moon still. They can't do so ...
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What are the minimum dimensions for planetary rings to be as visible as the moon in our night sky?
What are the minimum dimensions (length, width, height, etc.) for rings to at least be as significant (as in brightness/visibility) in the night sky as our moon?
Since there are so many variables ...
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Ringed planet: Reality check on ring-shadow visuals [duplicate]
This is one of a collection of questions about a ringed planet I am considering using as the setting for a fantasy novel. I would like the ringed planet to be as scientifically accurate as possible, ...
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How can I tell what my ringed planet will look like from the surface?
I'm considering writing a fantasy novel which takes place on a world with a ring. This ring is a very important part of the story, and I therefore want to be as accurate as possible in describing what ...