I'm writing a fantasy book (not in english, so forgive my grammar) and my world has some peculiarities:
> The world orbits a binary star system. > A red star and a blue star > The world has 3 moons > A big white one and 2 smaller ones. > I don't know if the 2 smaller moons also orbit the planet or if they orbit the bigger moon.
I've been doing some research and I found this model of the image.
How would be living in a planet like this one? For example:
> How would tides behave? > Which orbit is more likely to have a planet in the habitable zone s-type or p-type? > How would eclipse happens? > How long would take to a full daylight time to happen in a s-type orbit? > How likelly would be to have other (non habitable planets) in such system? > How likelly would be to have an asteroid belt or something similar? > Any other peculiarities you guys could tell to me would be appreciated.
I'm not a proffessional writer, its like a hobby, a project I'm having for the past 2 years, and despite I have writen some characters, kingdons, etc I want to work those aspects so I can work on religion, calendars, etc.
Considering the system has two suns, the radiation and heat must be pretty damn intense. Unless the planet has a really strong magnetic field and is far away from the binary system it's gonna get fucked up.
Colton King
> or if they orbit the bigger moon. I don't know how stable that orbit would be on any kind of timescale unless the other moons were hanging out at a Lagrange point trailing the primary moon.
David Roberts
Interesting. You are not the first to ask such a question in here by a long shot. Complex solar systems must be popular. (Pic. from last round)
Binary systems might be OK in itself. However blue stars emit a lot of radiation so life on the surface would be killed. That leaves aquatic or sub surface, including sub surface ocean life forms possible.
If the starts are close one might start "eating" the other and make the system uninhabitable even for a P-type world. If the distance is great I guess the P-type world would be very distant and therefore dark and cold.
My preference would be the S-type world around a red star that is a dwarf rather than red giant where the blue star is as far away as possible. in that case you will probably have a locked orbit with a permanent mostly fixed tide and insignificant tidal effect from the blue star. Then again I am not sure moons are viable in a tidally locked system.
Alternatively to fit in this zoo of moons you could have two of the moons in Lagrange points 4 and 5 and the third in orbit around one of these two, probably an unstable orbit.
Luke Thomas
> How would tides behave? Tides are related to day night cycles. You will get two tidal waves going around your planet in most cases, and how big the tides are, is related to how big your moon is. For simplicity's sake, i would just ignore the two smaller moons' as its not unreasonable to assume they have a negligible effect on the tides on the planet when you have a large moon that. Having multiple large moons around a smaller planet seems in a stable orbit seems unlikely too me anyway.
> Which orbit is more likely to have a planet in the habitable zone s-type or p-type? No idea. But it probably depends on a lot of things like, how close the suns orbit, and how intense they put out radiation. If its dwarf stars you have, then it would be different from normal stars.
> How would eclipse happens? Depends if its a P-type or S-type, in a P-type, then its no difference from earth.
> How long would take to a full daylight time to happen in a s-type orbit? Depends on orbit sizes.
> How likelly would be to have other (non habitable planets) in such system? Seems exoplanets are very common from what we have been able to observe. So probably very likely
> How likelly would be to have an asteroid belt or something similar? Depends on the other planets in your system, our inner asteroid belt is there because Jupiters huge gravity field disrupted normal planet formation in that region.
> Any other peculiarities you guys could tell to me would be appreciated. I don't think you would be able to tell a red sun and a blue sun apart. The colors of suns taken are very exaggerated. And the final colour of what we perceive the sun as comes from our atmosphere. In space with the naked eye you just see an intense white light, no matter what.
I didn't fact check any of this because I'm lazy, its probably a good idea to double check.
Hunter Cox
>> How long would take to a full daylight time to happen in a s-type orbit? >Depends on orbit sizes. Sorry, its the rotation of the planet that will matter.
Also, I have no idea how I made that many writing mistakes in one post.
Matthew Jackson
Thank you for the answers guys.
In this world life wasn't generated by randomness, but it was on purpose, so I think I can tell the strong magnectic field was intentional.
What about the mass of the moons?
What about the first post with the strong magnectic field? Would be possible to sustain life in the surface?
How would the sky looks in a s-type like you said?
If the 2 moons are in the points 4 and 5 they would all appear in the night? The points seems opposed to me.
I was thinking in a orbit similar to Earth for simplification purposes, but don't need to be necessarily the same.
Sebastian Thompson
>What about the first post with the strong magnectic field? Would be possible to sustain life in the surface? A red dwarf star can be fairly inactive in terms of radiation so you might do with a small magnetic field. If the blue star is nearby you would need an epic field strength to sustain life on the surface. Blue stars have major outbursts that make our coronal mass ejections seem like a walk in the park. If your life forms are meant to be advanced you would want a world where you can have cables that don't turn into lightening and satellites in orbit that are not mowed down.
>How would the sky looks in a s-type like you said? Pic. is an artist's impression of the Trappist system, might be close to what we are talking about. Just add a small blue dot to account for the blue star at a far and safe distance.
>If the 2 moons are in the points 4 and 5 they would all appear in the night? The points seems opposed to me. Many think we only see the Moon at night. That is not the case. In this case the moons would be visible only at dusk and dawn.
Daniel Watson
Updated fig. based on the svg at Wikipedia. Do you need the SVG file? Hope this makes sense. It shows why you will only see the moons at dawn and dusk.
Jason Bell
So the night sky would be dark?
Julian Ross
You'd think, but a red dwarf star's radiation isn't very intense past 1AU. Radiation intensity drops off with square of the distance. Alpha Centauri a and b are 11AU apart for example, which is far enough apart for them to not really cause any damage to planets around each respective star despite them both being yellow stars.
Jack James
>So the night sky would be dark? Given an Earth-like atmosphere the answer is yes. Red light is not scattered and there is very little blue light from a red dwarf. If the atmosphere has a different composition it might be different. Then again, it is possible that life on this fictional world would be able to see in different wavelengths than our eyes normally can.
>You'd think, but a red dwarf star's radiation isn't very intense past 1AU. Importantly there are no major outbursts that could sterilise the surface. Red dwarfs live for a long, long time and might have good chances to give life time enough to arise and evolve.
Kayden Cooper
>Alpha Centauri a and b are 11AU apart for example, which is far enough apart for them to not really cause any damage to planets around each respective star despite them both being yellow stars. It does put an upper limit on the size of your system though if you consider that 11au is just a little but farther than saturn is from the sun.
What does that mean? haha my name isn't Cristina btw.
Aiden Foster
I knew a person 2 years ago with that name. We are not english-speaking. And she was doing a very similar thing to this one you are doing. The chances for coincidence are not that high.
She was quite nerdy, but more on the math side. I remember I helped her a little bit.
Jose Long
>9332055 Pretty cool, I wish I knew Cristina. ////////////////////////////////////
Alexander Foster
>The excitement intensifies!
Carter Miller
to make you diagram a bit more accurate - colors as drawn would probably indicate a system comprised of analoges of b centauri and Proxima Centauri - in which case, the blue star would unquestionably dominate system center, and the red star - probably a dwarf - would rotate around the blue star much like a gas giant.
Andrew Evans
The figure is a hack in Inkscape based on the fig in Wikipedia that OP borrowed and very much not to scale.
What I wanted to indicate was that life around the red star is safest and to indicate moons in a Lagrangian system.
The requirements stated by OP are rather mysterious, like not knowing how the moons would be orbiting. I have no idea why this would have an effect.
There are many variations possible not touched upon yet, like co-orbital moons like our own Cruithne. If you want to edit this figure I could put the SVG file on Pastebin.
The way I imagine this world is that during the day the two suns take place into the sky like our sun or even bigger while during the night a giant bright white moon takes place into the sky with the 2 lesser moons around it, would any of this be possible?
Robert Clark
For the diagram above () you have two states for the S-type planet
A: Planet between the stars: no night, just red day or blue day, and the blue star might make the sky blue enough that you could have difficulties seeing the moons
B: Planet not between the two stars, you would get a red day, perhaps some blue light at dusk or dawn and you would be able to see moon(s) in L4 or L5 but not both. If the moons are very reflective you could see all moons during the day.
With moons in Lagrangian points you would not see them at night. For that you would need a moon orbiting the planet which is unrealistic if you have a bound orbit around a red dwarf star which has a small Goldilocks zone close to the star. So you might want a red star larger than a dwarf.
Fun fact: our moon has a surface as reflective as asphalt.
It might be easier to give you help if you tell us more what you need from the constellation.
Jonathan Wright
The craziest sci fi of all is accepting that earth is the only habitable planet in the entire universe
