Fiddle About

[den]

I was wondering what the world would look like if it was a moon of a large, ringed planet...





Once every month or so the world would be eclipsed for a couple of days. It would be very dark, and I imagine rather cold, especially in the winter hemisphere.



Low orbits would be interesting.

Comments

Re: The earth is doomed!

[(Anonymous)]

Hey again, bat!

Well, I was wrong (about some things, the earth still gets destroyed, probably).

Density, in fact, goes down with increasing radius. Poor astronomy on my part when I don't have a textbook with me. However, an important point is that Jupiter is 11.2 times the radius of the Earth. Planets don't get bigger than this, even when you add more mass, as they'd just collapse further. Radius will only go up when you add enough mass for nuclear fusion to start up, which again, would be bad news for the earth, sitting 10^7 kilometers from the sun (the sun, of course, having a radius of 7*10^7). Still, if you crank the radius down to a Jupiter radius (Rp=11.2), and use Jupiter's density in Earth units (1.33/5.52 = .24), and again using 20 for Ro, you get about 2. More destruction for Earth.

So anyway, I retract what I said earlier. If you'd like the Earth to survive (always a good idea), use one quarter for rho, an Rp no larger than 12, and again aim for a value of the earlier equation less than .1 ...

Happy genesising!

-Davros