Re: equinox
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, September 25, 1998, 3:15 |
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On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:49:50 -0300, Pablo Flores
<fflores@...> wrote:
>Procyon is a double system?
Yes, its companion is a white dwarf, with an orbital period of 40.65 =
years.
I've been reading about stars lately, and moving planets that were
inappropriately placed to more suitable stars. (The "lagomorphs of =
Arneb",
a distant F0 star, 900 light years away, now live on a planet orbiting a
much nearer, unnamed G0 star in the same constellation, only about 50 =
light
years away). But I didn't want to move the raccoon people away from
Procyon.
>I once began to think, just as an exercise, about how the seasons would =
go
>on in a planet with two or more suns. The idea is fascinating in the =
field
>of language too -- how would call the Sun(s)? In one of my SF stories, a
>planet with two suns was inhabited by a race who named them with a
>compound, something between a colective plural and a non-singular form
>(like 'the dead, the rich' in English). They imagined they were a mother
>and her daughter (so the word was feminine), and that the daughter
>constantly played around her mother in circles.
One possibility would be to borrow the Elfquest word "daystar" for the
brighter sun, and call the other one the "nightstar". In Jarrda that =
would
be "teppor" and "thlompor". Procyon B would be (if I did the math right) =
a
pinpoint of light with the brightness of the full moon on average, and =
its
brightness would vary according to the 40-year cycle. I'd guess that it's
probably too far away to affect the planet's orbit all that much, but I'm
not an astronomer.
>Anyway, there may not be seasons. If the Earth's axis were not tilted by=
23
>degrees, the eccentricity of the orbit wouldn't be enough to produce a
>noticeable change in global temperatures. (This would be boring, of =
course;
>I wouldn't have a conculture like that).
That's always possible, or (as in the case of another of my planets) the
only areas of the planet that are warm enough to be habitable may be in =
the
tropics. Alternatively, a planet with a closer to 90 degree tilt would =
have
radically different seasons.