#circumbinary planets

[neddea]

Hey guys, I’m cooking something… A very slow cooked meal. In the meantime, welcome to Noman’s Land/Gunsmoke! Some months ago I made a post about possible exoplanets orbiting two stars that could support life, and which ones would be a good fit for Noman’s Land, and the overall take was that most planets are gas giants and therefore can’t be lived in, but their moons could! So, with that in mind, I’ve been exploring this topic quite obsessively over the past few months and painted some concept art for this lunar iteration of Trigun’s world ��✨

The post I’m writing explaining all of this is VERY LONG and it’s taking quite some time, so until that one is done, here is an entire day on the least inhabited face of Noman’s Land:

So basically if you lived here you would experience two “night times” in one day, since the planet would eclipse the suns during noon (this moon is tidally locked because I say so). I’ll explain everything in detail on that long ass post!

Edit: I’ve made another post with the details on Kepler-47c and my No Man’s Land!

[skylobster]

So there must be some people who supervises the data gathering, reduction, and modeling done under this program. I think they should be referred to as BEBOP Cowboys (!)

Circumbinary systems contain planets that orbit around two stars in the center instead of just one, like in our solar system. Circumbinary planets orbit around both stars at once. The discovery, led by researchers at the University of Birmingham, is reported in the journal Nature Astronomy. The newly discovered planet is called BEBOP-1c, after the name of the project that collected the data. BEBOP stands for Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets. The BEBOP-1 system is also known as TOI-1338. In 2020, a circumbinary planet, called TOI-1338b, was discovered in the same system using data from NASA's TESS space telescope, to which the Birmingham team also contributed. That planet was discovered with the transit method and was noticed because it passed in front of the brighter of the two stars on several occasions.

Continue Reading

[frostgnawdraws]

I'm trying to come up with a post-game everyone-lives au for outer wilds but it involves significantly more Thinking About Scientific Accuracy than I am accustomed to. it's not going to stop me though

[netmassimo]

An article published in the journal "Nature Astronomy" reports the discovery of a second circumbinary planet that orbits the two stars that form the BEBOP-1 system. A team of researchers used the HARPS and ESPRESSO spectrographs to find for the first time a circumbinary planet using the radial velocity method. This exoplanet, cataloged as BEBOP-1 c, joins TOI-1338 b, discovered in 2020 thanks to NASA's TESS space telescope. Estimates indicate that BEBOP-1 c is a gas giant with a mass around 65 times the Earth's and a year lasting about 215 Earth days.

[stealingpotatoes]

Just a random fact: planets like Tatooine that have two suns actually exist and they're called “circumbinary” planets (because they orbit a binary star system :)

planets with two suns are actually called "super fucking hot" which is foreshadowing bc anakin, who lived there, is also super fucking hot. follow for more cinematic facts

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Some astronomically unusual habitable worlds

Or, weird star systems that include a habitable planet, or at least one in the habitable band that could be terraformed, on the assumption that systems you can live in are more interesting than those that can't. "Habitability" is a bit of a stretch here; a habitable world could be anywhere from "it has an evolved biosphere with plants you can eat" to "an airless rockball, but if you pelt it with enough comets, put a biosphere in place, maybe you could eventually live there" or perhaps one where someone already did the hard part; that part is deliberately vague depending on how hard your sci-fi is.

Throw these on a d10 or 2d6 table or something; stick "planet orbiting a yellow dwarf" and "moon of a gas giant orbiting a yellow dwarf" in the most common spots, and you're good to go. This is a draft of a setting design generator table I might use. I might use it for Stars Without Number or I might use it to fill in stuff about under-developed systems in BattleTech, for instance. None of these have precursor aliens so that they can be used in settings that don't include them (if you add precursor space habitats to your star system tables, you can get pretty wild and I do fully encourage that), though one of them assumes humans have been at this space colonization thing for centuries. Likewise, this doesn't include anything that requires Weird Space Magic, like hollow worlds with an antigravitational inside and an inner pseudosun. If that exists in your setting and you're building a Weird Planets table then by all means put that in.

If you want to follow real astronomical commonality, small dim stars are much more common than big bright ones. I'm not an astrophysicist, though, and I haven't done the math to demonstrate that any of these are physically possible.

A world in a distant orbit around a bright star. Because luminosity increases with mass faster than gravity does, this world has a very long orbit; seasons might last decades. Depending on the role solar gravity plays in your setting's FTL (if any), these planets might be faster to reach coming out of FTL.

Converse to that, circumbinary planets (with two closely-orbiting stars at the center of the system) will have shorter years in the habitable band, since the mass is divided among two separate stars leading to much lower luminosity for the same mass

A world in a spread-out binary star system (the planet is closer to its primary than the other star is). The other star shines brightly on it. In the right time of year, there's never a night dimmer than a full moon.

A spread-out binary system with two separate habitable worlds, light-hours or light-days apart

A planet in a binary system with two stars of greatly different brightness, but because of relative distance they appear similar. It's tide-locked to the dimmer star, giving it an uninhabitable hot side and an inhabitable side with a day/night cycle.

A world in a highly eccentric orbit around an extremely bright star. In time, it will fall in to the inner system and its seas and atmosphere will boil away, but that's maybe a century or three out

That same world, coming out the other side. It might have scorched ruins on it, left behind when it was abandoned. It's on its way to the outer system, where it will freeze for a thousand years or more.

A planet that distantly orbits a black hole or neutron star, its atmosphere restored after the supernova burned it off. At the rate its primary is radiating (remnant heat/accretion disk), it's exactly in the habitable band, for now.

An outlying "moon" of a gas giant. Instead of orbiting its primary properly, it orbits at the L4 or L5 Lagrange point

A binary planet in a low orbit around a red dwarf. Their tidal forces on each other are the only thing that has kept them from becoming tide-locked to their primary.

[pink-alien-queen]

9, 15, and 17?

9. Favorite pairing you wrote for this year?

I love all of them, but I think I had the most silly fun with Applehuskerdust. Like Huskerdust is already so good but adding Lucifer has just made it that much more fun for me.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

"Circumbinary Planet" will be running into next year most likely. I update that randomly and slowly so we'll see. And I can’t promise too much, but I have a couple of things for my daddy!Angel series in the drafts.

17. Your favorite character to write this year?

Easy: Husk. Most definitely Husk.

[twotales]

According to my research a wip I wrote Chuck's favorite star system is a quintuple star system, with five circumbinary planets, and fourteen moons

Fact

[meet-at-tycho]

ahem.

no i fucking adore them both like WOW.. their laughter, i remember? one time i joined call with them and they were laughing when i joined from a joke and. it was the most beautiful sound in the whole world like i nearly dropped dead on the spot. it feels embarrassing to love them so much? but i do i really do!!!! like SORRY.. i cant help it, ive never been happier alright the least i could do is express it. its.

IT IS EMBARRASSING THOUGH, whenever im lonely i just pretend theyre with me. when im downstairs i talk quietly, to myself but in my head im telling them what im thinking about and my opinion on which fnaf game is truly the best okay like. when i sleep at night i pretend we have a sleep over because i think thats so sweet!!! infected my mind like a fucking PLAGUE actual vermin alright. SICKENING

i KNOW its. i know its weird and probably unsettling honestly but. ITS JUST HOW I COPE OKAY theyre so far away from me, i dont know if ill ever get to see them, yknow? NO NIGHT ON THE TOWN WITH MY BESTIES..... BREAK MY HEART its the worst. this is how i cope with that 😞 IDK like

MAN i could go on and on and ON about it, the way im constantly having fun? and even when nothings happening at all, im just happy to be there. happy to share the silence with them, happy to listen to what they have to say, hear about their days, their feelings ETC like

theyre the kind of people you feel like youve known yr whole life yknow? people who have just cemented themselves in yr life so certainly, people who are imbedded in my soul right. I KNOW IM BEING SAPPY but im allowed okay im SAD.. i see them in all the things i do, i mutter their words to myself, im literally constantly saying i miss them in the middle of conversations with my sibling, they get annoyed BUT I DO...

yknow whats funny? anytime i go downstairs with my other friends on call i completely forget which ITS JUST IN MY NATURE alright once i focus on something else im GONE okay im coming back 45 minutes later one of thems gone the other one is asleep like. OOPS.. i was analyzing fnaf to my sibling thats my bad. but with them? its at the top of my mind. cant stay and talk longer, need to go back upstairs they are waiting for me!!!

i think its cuz.. to me, every single moment is precious. admittedly i am still scared to lose them, its just.. instinct at this point. i want to remember every day i spend with them, every conversation and. GRRRRR. i love them so much 🥳🥳 THEY CALL ME CIRCUMBINARY THE WAY I BE ORBITING TWO PERFECT STARS like wow. OKAY...

arent i the luckiest guy in the world? to have not one, but TWO people who understand me so deeply, who go out of their way to know me, to spend time with me ? it makes me tear up when i think about it IM FUCKEDDD man its so over for me. ive always been an outcast, feel like i never fit anywhere but. i fit HERE, this is where i belong!!! thats how they make me feel every single day :]

knowing them has me seeing sunshine and rainbows for the first time in my entire life like. i worked fucking hard, i got myself out of hell but after that i was alone again... not anymore!!! happy.. im happy. all theyve had to do was be here and im more than content, all they had to do was EXIST!!!

stars align in the weirdest ways, but im glad they did 🥳🥳🥳 peace and love on the planet earf

[wyrm-in-a-closet]

Science fact of the day- Pluto!

I was initially going to talk about Pluto's classification as a dwarf planet, but honestly I think thats worth leaving for another sfotd. Pluto has plenty of interesting elements by itself, and I think dwarf planets are just as worthy of love as their larger counterparts.

To start off, Pluto's surface is very unique and has several distinct features. One of the coolest Tombaugh Regio, a large bright area which is roughly heart shaped. which is just kinda cute tbh. One lobe of the Heart is called Sputnik Planitia, which is named after Sputnik 1, which is one of my favorite things ever. It has a large number of other features, including red regions probably caused by organic compounds called tholins as well as various dark and bright spots. Pluto also has another unique surface feature called Penitentes, which are sorta like spikes of snow- as far as we know, this only happens on Earth and Pluto, although theyre might also exist on Europa. Also, Pluto seems to have a really young surface. It has almost no craters at all, and in addition to other facts, it seems like it had a resurfacing event within only the last few hundred thousand years alone. I know that feels like a long time, but on the geological, let alone planetary time scale, that's nothing. hell, humans have been around longer than that, probably. which is honestly a bit wild. Pluto also has an atmosphere, although with a pressure of only one pascal (1/100,000 Earth's typical pressure) it's not too much to look at. It was initially expected that when pluto has farthest from the sun (aphelion), its atmosphere would freeze only to sublimate again when it got closer to the sun, but it doesn't seem like this actually happens.

Pluto also has 5 moons. The biggest of these is Charon, named after the ferryman of the dead from mythology. That said, it's entirely possible that Charon is actually also a dwarf planet. It's about half the size and one-tenth the mass of pluto, but thats still possibly large enough for it to meet the qualifications for a dwarf planet. if this is the case, then Charon and Pluto would form a binary dwarf planet system, and when looking at the two, this is generally a more useful to way to think of them. One insteresting consequence of Charon's size is that it doesn't actually orbit Pluto- instead, it orbits around the common center of mass of the two objects, called the barycenter. Because it's so massive, the barycenter lays signifignatly beyond the surface of pluto, and thus pluto also seems to orbit the barycenter, although at a much closer distance than Pluto does. Technically speaking, any two orbits which orbit one another orbit a common barycenter, however, unless their even close to similar in mass, the barycenter will lay very near the center of the larger body. With the Earth and Moon, the barycenter sits only about 1500 km below the surface- about one quarter of the way down to the center of the planet. outside of pluto and charon, the only other notable object with a barycenter outside itself is actually the sun, specifically in its orbit around Jupiter. despite jupiter only being .1% of the mass of the sun, because its so far away, their common center of mass is just a bit above the sun's surface. While a barycenter is mainly important for two bodies orbiting each other, other objects can also orbit around that barycenter. this called a circumbinary orbit, and its the state in which plutos other four moons exist. circumbinary orbits need to be further out and moving relatively slowly in order to be stable, and are generally pretty small objects, so pluto's four other moons are really, really tiny, and generally not as interesting, unfortunately.

[neddea]

Some days ago I made this post with some concept art, so here’s a little bit more info about my No Man’s Land! (Disclaimer about the details below the cut: I’m just an artist and in no way, shape or form a scientist, even less so an astrophysicist, so the chances of some of this info being wrong or dubious are very high lol)

Just as a little bit of context, Kepler-47 is an actual “solar system” with two host stars. We’ve been able to find three planets so far, and the outermost (47c) lies in the habitable zone. All three of them are gas giants (or rather “puffy giants” since they’re surprisingly not very dense and temperate).

I’m not gonna give too many details about the real 47c, I’ll leave that for the long post I’m working on (if I ever get to actually publish it, let’s be honest), but the only thing to keep in mind is that Nomans would be a moon orbiting this planet. Also, I decided that people would shorten “No Man’s Land” to “Nomans” overtime, which is the name I’m gonna be using. The question is: how do we call the people living there? Nomanians?

So here are the main points of my design!

-I’ve given 47c several other moons because I wanted it to match the canon as much as I could, and I think it might even help the stability of the orbits if they’re in a specific resonance? Idk, maybe an actual astrophysicist could give me some advice on this (please do)

-The interesting bit about trying to make it match the canon is that I had to make Nomans tidally locked to 47c just to have an excuse for why we never see the big planet on the sky. The idea would be that most of the Seeds ships crashed into the outer face of the moon, and since the other side, the one that’s always looking at 47c, has more extreme conditions precisely because of the influence of the host planet on it, not many people have ventured too much into these lands. At least until now…

-Speaking of the other moons, which one would be the best candidate for the Fifth Moon incident? (Spoiler alert for Maximum and ‘98: Knives forces Vash to use his Angel Arm and he ends up firing at the fifth moon, which leaves its surface marked with a big crater) We have two options: It could be one of the outer moons (the ones whose orbit is beyond that of Nomans) since those are the ones more likely to be present in the visible sky; or it could be Moon II, whose regolith would be launched into space from the blast and form the rings…

-The surface gravity is almost identical to ours here on Earth, although slightly lighter (9.66 m/s^2 compared to 9.8 m/s^2).

-Nomans is somewhat bigger than Mars but smaller than Earth.

-One day lasts for almost 27 hours, and one year would take almost 270 Nomanian days (I swear this was a coincidence). Also, a fun fact on which I’m basing the calendar system (still working on that): it takes 6.6 days for the two stars to orbit around each other. People probably noticed this and were like “Sure, that’s the seven days of the week if you ask me”, probably so that they didn’t have to figure out everything from scratch (I’d do the same). It would be fun to see different cities and places to develop their own weird and wonderful systems (not me spending several hours yesterday to understand all the Maya calendars and wondering what they would come up with in this alien planet moon…).

-And speaking about time, here’s a visual explanation on how the times of day work on the side facing 47c! I realized the other day that at noon the light would probably be tinted slightly red (or some other color, depending on the elements found on 47c’s atmosphere), just like it happens on our Moon when there’s a lunar eclipse. Please make as if you didn’t know this and let’s move on. Also, as a Spaniard I have the right to declare noon time in this part of the world the Sacred Siesta Period.

(Also, shout out to @norageonlypancakes because my main inspiration for these BGs is Chesley Bonestell, he was The Space Artist™️ of the 20th century and inspired so many people to become space nerds or even scientists!) (Also x2, thank you everyone for the lovely comments and tags on the previous post <3)

[pluralzalpha]

Galactic Gazetteer: Risa

Class: M

Quadrant: Beta

Primary: Epsilon Ceti (circumbinary orbit)

Distance from Earth: approx. 90 ly

Moons: three

Inhabitants: Risians, Nuvians and many others

Affiliation: United Federation of Planets

Appearances: TNG "Captain's Holiday" (1990), DS9 "Let He Who is Without Sin" (1996), ENT "Two Days and Two Nights" and "The Seventh" (2002), DIS "Terra Firma pt 2" (2020)

Fun fact: a pleasure planet - the top place to get laid in the Trek galaxy.

Another fun fact: kept comfortable by a weather control system and seismic regulators.

Fun fact 3: Roddenberry wanted lots of gay culture on Risa on TNG, but famed homophobe Rick Berman vetoed this.

[quasiimodo]

❤️💛🎨🎁 for the fanfic ask game! :D

fanfic writer ask game

❤️ What is your favorite line that you’ve written in a fic?

god, this is a tough one! I have a lot of favourites, but I think this line from one of my Kiribaku fics might be one of my faves

Katsuki and Kirishima were like two moons circling the same planet. Always moving in the same direction, but never quite meeting. A circumbinary orbit. 

💛 What is the most impactful lesson you’ve learned about writing?

Sometimes, you just have to put words on paper! Even if they're not good words, I've always found the hardest part about writing to be starting. Sometimes you just gotta slap some terrible writing on the page, or maybe start in the middle rather than the beginning! Just put something down, and then it becomes 10x easier than before!

🎨 If someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?

I would love to see someone draw my Todoiideku fic "hold you close and hold you fast" because there's a really sweet scene where the three of them fall asleep together in a hospital bed post-Hosu. I just,,,, love that image so much

🎁 Have a piece of a WIP you want to share?

Not actually a WIP, but a completed fic that I'll be posting tomorrow for the start of DR Rarepair Week!

 “How’s the dough looking?” 

Gonta stops his mixing, holding out the bowl towards Taka for approval. “This okay?” he asks. 

“Most impressive, Gonta!” Taka’s face lights up with a smile, and Gonta’s heart soars. “Your mixing skills are most admirable! Where have you been all my life?” 

“At home,” Gonta replies earnestly. “And some time in forest as well.” 

Taka laughs, his head thrown back and his eyes crinkled with amusement. “You always seem to know just what to say!” 

His brows furrow in response. “Gonta do?” he asks. 

Taka just grins, placing a hand on Gonta’s shoulder. His heartbeat increases, and his grip tightens on the wooden spoon. “You do,” he repeats, his other hand taking the bowl from Gonta. “Now, let’s get these cookies onto the tray!” 

[whumpster-fire]

Here I have to point out: we have one planet with a giant moon out of a sample size of, like, 2. There are only two terrestrial planets in our solar system whose current rotation rate would allow for the long term stability of a large moon: Earth and Mars.

You may have heard that our moon is very slowly receding from Earth and slowing Earth's rotation down due to tidal effects. This only occurs if the planet's rotation period is longer than the moon's orbital period and it orbits in the same direction the planet spins. If the reverse is true, tides will speed up the planet's rotation (or slow down a retrograde rotation) and make the moon spiral inward. This is happening in our solar system. Mars's inner moon, Phobos, orbits too close to Mars, and Neptune's moon Triton is in a retrograde orbit. Both are slowly losing orbital energy and will eventually get too close and be torn apart. (The giant planets also have many other retrograde moons but they're small and really far out. Tidal orbital changes happen faster with a large, close in moon).

Mercury and Venus both have extremely slow rotations. Mercury's rotation has been braked by strong solar tides due to its close orbit, which would have caused any large moons it had in the past to spiral in and be destroyed. Venus has a weird retrograde rotation that's slightly slower than its orbit, and IIRC it's still not fully understood what caused this, but depending on how and when it ended up in that state it's possible that it could have had a moon formed by an impact sometime in the past that it later lost.

We don't know how common large impact-formed moons are around Earthlike planets. However, some studies suggest that they could actually be pretty common: one study suggests around 2% to 25% of roughly earth-sized planets could have them. It's also unclear what the subset of planets that have complex life would look like: some scientists think the stabilizing effect of our moon on our axis tilt might be necessary for earthlike life to develop at all.

(note also that comparatively large moons seem to be pretty common for dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt and beyond, but the low orbital speeds and the weaker gravity of Pluto-sized and smaller objects would mean slower and less violent collisions which may be better at forming moons)

"Perfect" total eclipses, however, are likely to be... pretty rare? The rate at which tides make a moon recede varies extremely strongly with the distance. A moon a bit smaller than ours would still end up almost as far out after a few billion years and its angular diameter would likely be too small for a total eclipse unless the star's angular diameter is also significantly smaller (possible for a planet orbiting a hotter star, one orbiting farther out in the habitable zone, or a planet with an eccentric orbit where the star is smaller at apoastron. Also technically a circumbinary planet in the habitable zone since each star would be smaller, but if only one of the stars was eclipsed the other one would be too bright to see anything besides one of the suns briefly vanishing). Moons proportionally bigger than ours start getting into the range where they'd cause a mutual tidal lock with their planets and would end up appearing bigger, but I have no idea how common those are even out of the subset of planets with big moons.

However, "double planet" systems, as well as habitable moons of gas giants, are likely to have frequent total eclipses, and a moon or planet being too big wouldn't make the star's corona totally impossible to see. The corona is a lot bigger than the sun's disc, and even if a moon or planet was big enough to blot it out, you could still see at least half of the sun's corona at the start and end of totality. However, smaller features close to the star's photosphere, such as prominences, would be much harder to see during an eclipse if the moon was too big.

All I ask is that if humans make it very far into space, to the point where we work with alien civilizations that have never ever been anywhere near Earth, we all have to agree: don't tell them about the moon.

Hear me out. I'm not trying to be weird about this. Just... just okay listen. The moon of the Earth is huge, like gigantormoon size. Bigger than most moons. Okay? And I think- no, hush down. I think the expressions on their faces will be hilarious.

Like, for real- stop laughing at me, I'm serious. For real, imagine they show up on the day of a lunar eclipse. They're like "oh this'll be neat- WHAT THE FUUUUUCK! WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING TO YOUR SUUUUNNNNN!"

Greatest. Prank. Ever.

[spacetodaypt]

This is a First. An Exoplanet in a Polar Circumbinary Disc Surrounding Two Stars.

We live in an age of exoplanet discovery. One thing we’ve learned is not to be surprised by the kinds of exoplanets we keep discovering. We’ve discovered planets where it might rain glass or even iron, planets that are the rocky core remnants of gas giants stripped of their atmospheres, and drifting rogue planets untethered to any star. Now, astronomers have uncovered evidence of an exoplanet in…

[inkyvoids]

We live in an age of exoplanet discovery. One thing we’ve learned is not to be surprised by the kinds of exoplanets we keep discovering. We’ve discovered planets where it might rain glass or even iron, planets that are the rocky core remnants of gas giants stripped of their atmospheres, and drifting rogue planets untethered to any star. Now, astronomers have uncovered evidence of an exoplanet in a circumbinary disk around a binary star. The remarkable thing about this discovery is that the disk is in a polar configuration. That means the exoplanet moves around its binary star in a circumpolar orbit, and this is the first one scientists have found. AC Herculis (AC Her) is a binary star about 4200 light-years away. The primary star is well-studied, while its partner is invisible. It has a polar circumbinary disk, which is unusual but not unheard of. In a new paper, a team of researchers presents evidence for the polar circumbinary exoplanet.