Is it possible to have an interior gas giant in a solar system...

Is it possible to have an interior gas giant in a solar system? One that would regularly eclipse a planet and plunge it into darkness for a few days?
Doing some worldbuilding and I don't want to spit in the face of astronomy

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I'm not an expert in astronomy but if a gas giant of comparable size to say, Jupiter, is close enough to your planet it regularly causes a total solar eclipse then it'll create all sorts of gravity fuckery. At that point there's a good chance your "planet" is actually just the gas giant's cuck moon.

>Is it possible to have an interior gas giant in a solar system? One that would regularly eclipse a planet and plunge it into darkness for a few days?

Not to detract or bully, but why not have your world the moon of some gas giant? Just curious.

OP is Jupiter, and is trying to eat our Sun.

>OP is Jupiter, and is trying to eat our Sun.

That sounds like something Jupiter would do. He's always been a power-hungry giant with a chip on his shoulder.

I have considered it. I think an eclipse would happen too often, but I could make it work.
Thematically though, it makes more sense to have it be it's own planet.

...

Hot Jupiters are a thing so maybe.
But has a point.
A total solar eclipse only lasts for about a minute maximum.
I'm pretty sure a gas giant would have to be really goddamn close to have an eclipse last for days.
It's probably not good for the tides to have such a massive object approach so close.

>I have considered it. I think an eclipse would happen too often, but I could make it work.

For the record I'm not actually sure if you were a Gas Giant's moon if you'd just be eclipsed all the time, every day,('till it was night time basically) or if it'd just be like everyday for 3 hours before and after noon or something like that.

Either way it'd be fucking wacky and the skyline of your world would be breathtaking.

>For the record I'm not actually sure if you were a Gas Giant's moon if you'd just be eclipsed all the time, every day,('till it was night time basically) or if it'd just be like everyday for 3 hours before and after noon or something like that.

That depends on the Moon's rotation speed vs the speed at which it circles the gas giant.

Luna's rotation is actually sync'd up so we always see the same side of it, but it doesn1t have to be the same for all moons, I think.

An issue that I'm not mentioning is that I am doing my worldbuilding AFTER I have already started running a game.
I decided I wanted to really flesh out the world, but we have been playing for 5+ years now. I established that there is a gas giant that eclipses the planet for a large chunk of time every year- I thought it was a cool way to give vampires a real edge every so often. It gave my players a deadline.

Almost all regular satellites in our solar system are in synchronous orbit with their planets. There are quite a few smaller, irregular satellites which aren't.

Of course we don't know if this is universal or not.

You are right about the landscape being breathtaking. That is definitely a plus.

If you have vampires, you are playing a straight up fantasy game or a game with some heavy fantasy elements. Just make shit up. Lots of settings literally have moons associated with deities that don't follow any kind of astronomically reasonable orbit or trajectory, so why not do that. Just go the whole way and say it's a whole celestial body made from blood the god of vampires collected, and his darkest prophecies promise that one day it will be great enough to forever cover whatever planet players are on in shadow.

You can. Look up Hot Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus. Your planet would indeed be a moon of that gas giant.

However, those moons are most likely bathed in a lot of radiation from the gas giant. Gravity from the gas giant is also very likely to do some very bad things to your moon. Think Io.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter
>Simulations have shown that the migration of a Jupiter-sized planet through the inner protoplanetary disk (the region between 5 and 0.1 AU from the star) is not as destructive as one might assume. More than 60% of the solid disk materials in that region are scattered outward, including planetesimals and protoplanets, allowing the planet-forming disk to reform in the gas giant's wake. In the simulation, planets up to two Earth masses were able to form in the habitable zone after the hot Jupiter passed through and its orbit stabilized at 0.1 AU. Due to the mixing of inner-planetary-system material with outer-planetary-system material from beyond the frost line, simulations indicated that the terrestrial planets that formed after a hot Jupiter's passage would be particularly water-rich.

To give you some idea, .1 AU is about five times closer to the sun than Mercury, so those fuckers can get really close in.

That's pretty edgy. I could roll with that.
I'm a big fan of fantasy grounded in reality is all. I feel like when my science works alongside magic, it helps with suspension of disbelief.

>I thought it was a cool way to give vampires a real edge every so often.
You could have achieved the same effect with a greater axial tilt.
Even on Earth, the Arctic circle experiences 30 days of uninterrupted light and 30 days of uninterrupted dark every year during the most extreme portions of the tilt.
So if you had a planet with tilted back and forth even farther, it'd have some weird-ass summers and winters. And the extended days and nights would last longer and affect greater portions of the planet
I have no idea what it would do to the weather or anything, though.

Or you coulda just gone full supernatural and just said something about a Vampire God causing Blood Moons and shit.

>If you have vampires, you are playing a straight up fantasy game or a game with some heavy fantasy elements

Not necessarily

I actually did read a bit about hot gas giants! I downloaded the UNL orbit simulation and have been trying out different masses of celestial bodies. I could get a gas giant to orbit inside and eclipse, but it didn't last nearly as long as I wanted it to.

That is true. I was not as great a GM back then, a lot less experience. I thought the idea of a massive eclipse caused by a planet was more intriguing then other, more supernatural options. The planet / moon does not have a whole lot of axial tilt, only about 15.5 degrees.

Correct. The moon of a gas giant would have a ton of problems, radiation being the least of them. Tides would be affected, earthquakes as a result of plate tectonics, magnetic fluctuations from storms on the surface of the gas giant. It wouldn't be pretty at all, and there are a lot of drawbacks. But that is the fun of worldbuilding, isn't it? Trying to fix those issues, or building life around them.

Don't get me started.

Jupiter has a pretty brutal radiation belt which most of its moons orbit within, but Saturn's is much milder, and a moon can orbit in a sheltered part of the parent planet's magnetic field which would keep it safe from radiation. You'd think the impact of a massive planet on tectonics would be pretty enormous, but the only moon in the solar system thought to have plate tectonics is Europa (Io has a shitload of volcanoes though). Tidal heating is handy in terms of making a moon orbiting a gas giant a bit warmer, and giving it a magnetic field of its own, which might help it keep an atmosphere. With the right orbital period and plane it could be entirely possible for the megaeclipse to only happen every now and then, rather than on every rotation (lunar eclipses aren't any more common than solar eclipses here on earth, in fact a little less so).

Anyway, it's a setting for a game, so OP can fudge most of this stuff.

I seem to remember seeing somewhere that unless something acts to perturb the system, moons in stable low eccentricity orbits inevitably end up tidally locked...

No.
Planets closer to the sun are always made of heavier stuff. You can't have a solid earth-like planet farther from the sun than a fucking gas giant.
Besides if the giant gets so close as to block the sun entirely, your planet being dominated by vampires is the least dangerous stuff your party has to worry about.

The only possiblity is having a huge gas giant orbiting a sun and your planet-sized moon orbiting that gas giant.

But that is just a bunch of astronomical "ackshually".

yea, it could "kinda" be a thing

"kinda" because that gas giant needs to be a lot more massive than Jupiter, like a brown dwarf, which is in a grey area between a gas giant and a star. It does not generate (visible) light and it is heavy enough to not let its gasses escape.

then you take that brown dwarf and put it into a binary star system with the proper main star. It doesn't even need to be binary, it could be trinary or quadruple star system.

Yes

Please get started.
I've never heard of this story before this thread and the wikipedia entry about it talks about autistic alien chinese rooms and then earth was eaten by vampires off screen. the end.
I'm both intrigued and angry at it at the same time and I'm trying to decide if it's worth adding to my reading list or not.

>Is it possible to have an interior gas giant in a solar system?

Yes, BUT its rare as fuck, perfect for adding interesting explanations for this fenomena.

ne that would regularly eclipse a planet and plunge it into darkness for a few days?

Only if its a moon and try hours unless your want your planet to be nearly tidelocked in its rotation with days that last months or something like that.

For anything further than that they require absoultely perfect alineation, both in position and speed for a long period which is literally imposible to sustain naturally.

Artificially, welp, you require gods for this task, but why not?

>Is it possible to have an interior gas giant in a solar system?

Is it possible for OP to google it and not be a faggot for once?

I've never read it but Watts is pretty good and I've heard a lot of recommendations about this book.

It's really good. A fascinating hard sci fi read if you can get past the fact the protagonist is by intention a bitter misanthropic sperg.

>there are people who still have images of board tans

that depends on how inclined the moons orbit is relative to the plane of the planets orbit around the star.
our moons orbit is inclined at 5° so it only gets 2-5 eclipses a year. Most of the time when behind earth its also "above" or "below"it and so still gets sunlight.
a more inlined orbit will have less frequent eclipses.

If a gas giant is blocking the sun for a few days then you're on it's moon.

yeah. something to do with tidal drag I think is the term. The same process also slows the planets rotation and imparts that extra momentum on the moon, making its orbit wider. When the moon formed a day on earth was only ~3 hours and the moon was only about 30,000km away.

>Planets closer to the sun are always made of heavier stuff. You can't have a solid earth-like planet farther from the sun than a fucking gas giant
planets even gas giants are known to "migrate" due to interactions with other planets and stars. " Hot jupiters" are gas giants observed to currently be in an orbit far to close to their star to have formed. Often they're closer than mercury is to our sun.

Gas giants can not exist as close to the sun as the earth is. The extra heating from the sun will causes gases to escape, and over time, strip away the gas layer. The Earth's gravity is not strong enough to hold hydrogen or helium, and neither is Jupiter's if it was earth distance from the sun and earth temperature.

The star would have to be extraordinarily young, too young to have a rocky planet develop intelligent life. The only way it could happen is if a star faring species founded a colony on the rocky world very early into the star's lifetime.

Gas giants can't form that close . but they sure as hell are fine if they get there, a large portion of exoplanets observed so far are such planets (likely largely because they're the easiest kind to detect). Called Hot Jupiters, most are actually closer to their star than mercury.

yes. its possible. look at the kepler data.

It's obviously possible for there to be hot jupiters and the like, just get an angular diameter for the gas giant in relation to your planet to get a distance at eclipse, then compare it with the gas planet's sphere of influence. If it's smaller than the distance from your planet and its moons, you're good.

As for eclipses lasting days, that's the trickier part. Highly elliptical orbits with very long periods could maybe help a bit, but not by much. If I were you, I'd just have the god(s) give you a helping hand in that regard

>As for eclipses lasting days, that's the trickier part.
i believe it would be possible with a hypothetical hot Jupiter with a close in moon whos orbital period is comparable to the planets orbital period, such that its nearly "tidally locked" to behind the planet from the stars frame of reference. Such a system would probably need to be around a red dwarf star to have the moon not be to hot and irradiated for life.

You guys don't get the scale of jupiter.

If you lived on ganymede, which takes 7 days to orbit jupiter, you'd have 2 days of night when jupiter eclipses the sun.