Re: Planets and Moons

Sally Caves wrote:
>
> I enjoyed looking at these pages, too, but I didn't find any information
> among them for constructing a system where two Earth-sized planets revolve
> around each other.  Maybe it's an impossibility.
I think I read somewhere, perhaps in one of the replies to this thread, that
it _is_ possible-- the two planets have to orbit a common point, which in
turn orbits their sun...but I suspect it requires some fairly heavy
math/physics to figure out.

Barry Garcia wrote:
> >> I'm finding the pages that Roger linked on how to construct a
> >> realistic planet to be very cool. It's actually fun to work out
> >> various planets and their stats!
Indeed. I've kinda come to the conclusion that these lessons are best
thought of as "Astronomy for Fun" ("...for dummies" maybe accurate, but just
doesn't sound very nice). Still, they're helpful and instructive.

> >>
> >> I just wish there was a program out there that could show a diagram of
> >> where your planets [in an entire solar system] would lie (if there is,
> >> where is it?).
I haven't come across one yet. Others may know.
Since our solar system is the only one we know about, one might assume it's
the norm. (Seems a mighty big assumption!)  But given a sun and its type,
Viau does give figures for the orbit of an earth-like planet; so you could
make the others fit in by fiat, but not departing too radically from our
system. (I need someday to figure this out for Cindu's system, which by fiat
has 8 planets, Cindu being the 2nd.)

It does seem reasonable that the less the density, the larger the orbit has
to be (need to review figures in Viau to be sure that's true; size may be a
factor too).

Remi Villatel gave an interesting link/portal:
http://empireans.aequarion.com/

Which includes this one (a little more math-y than Viau, but it has even
more links)--
http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/worldkit/index.html#map

Annoyingly, the links to all the "world building" mail-lists seem to be
dead, or at least non-functioning when I tried them.

Reply