43
He was an old man of 90 harvests
The seasons on this planet are mild, so ancient people wouldn't care much about how often they went around their suns. Instead, they'd care about when to plant crops and when to sow them.
Clearly, no civilization could live off of harvesting crops only every 6 years (starvation was rampant in early human history even when ...
31
Your death star blast is so weak that they wont notice it.
9km/s is below the 11.1km/s you need to break out of Earths gravity well. All those chunks are going up, slowing down, and coalescing back and reforming a new planet from the same parts.
They're in geostationary orbit (35,786 kilometres above equator)
Earth explodes at 9km/s in all directions. Those ...
15
One star blocks the heat from the other.
If both stars and your planet are all collinear then your planet is getting hit with one stars worth of heat, the other star is occluded by the closer star. When the stars rotate 90 degrees in their orbits, and both stars are visible to the planet, then your planet gets the power of both of them at once.
So by making ...
14
What would seasons and daylight be like if the Earth was on an eight-shaped orbit between two stars?
There's a lot of questions here - so I'm just going to focus on your main one about "what are the seasons and days like?" (the mods will probably make you edit your question down to this shortly anyway.)
That said I believe your planet will be habitable but on the hot side, I haven't done the calculations, because there are mitigation strategies ...
11
You're Looking for the Roche Limit
The Roche Limit is a term for how close one celestial body can pass to another one, and still stay together under the force of gravity. If the Earth was a mass of chargeless dust or non-viscous liquid, at this closeness to another larger gravitating body Earth would begin to fall apart.
But Earth isn't a chargeless dust or ...
8
You could leave the seasons out of it and somewhat decouple the time counting from astronomical events.
Most people I know are pretty comfortable working with units like weeks and hours without them being directly observable in nature. We use units like this because sticking to days, years and lunar months would give us too large or too small numbers to be ...
7
My answer to this question:
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/151398/aliens-blew-up-pluto-so-we-would-stop-debating-whether-or-not-to-call-it-a-plane[1]
Discusses whether Earth life would survive if Pluto was exploded.
As you can see, I tend to believe in the Endor Holocaust.
I may note that Pluto has a mass of 0.00218 Earth, so Earth is 458....
7
If you look at this chart which is a staple of worldbuilding, you can see what is the relationship between a planet escape velocity, its temperature and the type of gases which it can trap for a reasonably long period of time.
In principle a body as small as Io can keep an atmosphere similar to that of Venus, but it would need to be at a temperature so low (...
answered Nov 13 at 9:09
7
Why do humans measure time in years? The reason is that the yearly cycle of seasons is very important for our lifestyle. Depending on the time of the year, humans dress differently, work differently, spend their recreational time differently and eat differently. This was even more extreme when we were still an agricultural society.
The seasons on Earth are ...
7
Binary star:
Your answer is right there in your star system configuration, you just need to fiddle a bit with the suns.
You currently have two suns, one heavy and bright, the other much smaller?
Change this so that one star is massive, but not very luminous. This one mainly determines your orbits for the system. As stellar mass usually is a strong ...
6
Earth has developed matter displacement technology (aka beaming in Star Trek). It was designed to move resources from the asteroid belt or moons into earth orbit or directly onto the surface in a matter of seconds.
So they built a giant space station, collecting huge amounts of energy from the sun and what-not and aiming at what was to be displaced.
However, ...
6
-120 to +102 degrees C
You've used "Earth-like" so I'm assuming everything else is Earth-like too, with the only difference being the slight counter-rotation allowing a day to be 3 times longer than a year.
So I can answer this by building on this detailed breakdown of an Earth-like planets weather where the rotation was 0, but the planet still ...
6
What would seasons and daylight be like if the Earth was on an eight-shaped orbit between two stars?
I don't think your orbit is stable. What may work is to have a plant orbiting a small star in an eccentric orbit, while the small star orbits a larger brighter star in much larger eccentric orbit.
Now you have a wildly fluctuating climate that depend on:
Period around the small star.
Tilt of the planet compared to plane of orbit.
Rotational period.
So ...
6
It depends on what effects you are looking for. In terms of breathability, there would be none per se. That is to say that whether the atmosphere has helium in it or not is not important for oxygen metabolizing lifeforms. In fact, SCUBA divers frequently use a helium/oxygen mix called heliox for deep dives, because Nitrogen is a dangerously narcotic ...
5
So you need a natural process that makes simple sugars, and then creates a sugar syrup, and then dries that out to create crystals.
This is a bit of a stretch, but, here goes:
Start with a planet with only bees and tiny, flowering plants.
Bees produce honey from plants. (Honey is basically fructose, glucose and water)
These bees overproduce and stockpile (...
5
"Hysterical Raisins"
"Historical reasons" are the only reason that people on another planet would measure time using Earth terms.
Already on the ISS, on the moon, and when we eventually get to Mars, we use (or will initially use) UTC, with Julian days and the Gregorian calendar.
But it stretches reader credulity to have your planet be ...
4
It is imposible due to how planets (and astroids) get their's form at fist place.
If we somehow magicaly remove half of the Earth, the remaining half would immediately start to turn into a sphere (80% of former diameter), greatly heating in the process. This would certainly destroy all the surface.
Same goes for all large parts (> 1km) - they would ...
4
Absolutely
In fact, using reality as much as you can to create the "infrastructure" of your world is a great way to get a realistic feeling to a fictional world. Better still, NASA happens to be a bit ahead of you.
The outer planet, Kepler-47c, orbits its host pair every 303 days, placing it in the so-called "habitable zone," the region ...
4
Condition: The event must happen in minutes
Impossible. Really, it's impossible. Consider an earthquake, for which minutes is a very, very long time. It flattens buildings. An earthquake lasting minutes would flatten cities. The destruction of the world in just minutes would flatten literally everything. Worse, it would churn everything into dirt soup. ...
4
Space is big.Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggling big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen; when you're thinking big, think bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning ...
4
You have to redesign most electronics. Crystal oscillators change frequency in the presence of helium. (Exposure to a helium leak will kill your cell phone for some hours because of this.)
4
Could portions of this planet's dayside be habitable?
Yes.
What would its climate look like?
Well, that gets complicated... there are multiple possible atmospheric circulation cycles that could apply, depending on details of exactly how fast the planet spins (i.e., how long its year is), how thick the atmosphere is, and so on.
In broad strokes, you likely ...
3
According to sources listed on this page, the minimal safe comfortable radius of a spinning habitat is ~12 meters.
This is due to the gravitational gradient between the head and the feet of the person living in such habitat: in a small diameter drum, it becomes too pronounced (The feet experience greater centrifugal force than the head), and the result ...
3
Planets can have tails. But I am skeptical about a gas giant.
Comets have 2 kinds of tails: a tail made of dust left in the wake of the comet, and a tail of ionized gas blown off by the solar wind.
It turns out that Venus (and theoretically also Mars) sometimes have ionized tails caused by the solar wind. See this page on the ESA website.
For Earth, which ...
3
in a short term, I think so.
in a long term... no.
here is my view of your scenario. if the space station is very modern, areas should be able to be closed off and hereby saving the crew.
but there will die slowly for what I can see. because;
they have lost their planet. meaning no place to go and no new way of getting oxygen, food, or fuel to the spaceship....
3
nBos AstroSynthesis. It is a full, scientifically accurate, star system simulator. Can do entire sectors of space. Allows you to generate planetary systems with full accurate orbits, and even animate their motion. It's going to be the closest thing to what you are looking for.
3
In the short and medium term, it will cause: absolutely nothing.
In the long term, astronomically speaking, it will result in a slight increase in the number of asteroids coming close to and eventually hitting Earth. Mars does play a (very minor) role in herding the asteroid belt into its current extent. The extreme vast majority of this is handled by ...
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