More Star Hero, but applicable to my Fantasy Setting...

[Kraven Kor]

My fantasy setting has been vindicated! 

 

I had many discussions here and elsewhere about the nature of my Fantasy Setting - a tidally locked planet orbiting the smaller star of a binary pair.  Pretty much everyone said it would be impossible, not support life, etc.

 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/full-atmosphere-ocean-model-of-a-rotationally-locked-exoplanet/

 

I had accepted that and done the "But I am GOD" hand-wave anywho, but looks like my world would not be so far from reality afterall?

 

Granted, Lostorum probably doesn't have a long time to live given the shorter lifespans of dwarf stars; but then I don't need a plot that spans millions of years

[DShomshak]

No no, red dwarf stars shine longerthan Sunlike stars. It's the brighter, more massive stars that burn out faster. So there's billions of years more for life to form.

 

You probably still need to apply your Divine GM Handwavium to deal with other problems: notably, red dwarfs are almost all prone to gigantic solar flares that can be much brighter than the star itself. What's worse, the blast of charged particles from the flares will gradually blast off the atmosphere. (Unless the planet has a really-really strong magnetic field? Many unknowns here.)(Or yeah, it's magic.)

 

But a very atmospheric Fantasy or Planetary Romance setting. A quest into the frozen Dark Side where the sun never shines, yeah!

 

Dean Shomshak

[Kraven Kor]

Oh yeah still plenty of handwavium.

 

It is not a circular orbit; which is a necessity for a tidally locked planet.  The planet's seasons are due to the distance from the host star as the planet is pulled out towards the distant primary star of the binary pair.  The "tidally locked" planet also has a bit of a wobble, giving a day / night cycle at the equator.

 

In reality, this planet would be in the process of being torn apart, or would have such massive tectonic upheavals that life would not yet have developed.

 

Gives a great duality to the world - reptiles and amphibians and other species adapted to the heat and constant sun of the southern hemisphere, mammals and cold-climate critters in the temperate zone, naught but myths and legends above the "Twilight Circle" where the only light is that from the distant, pale blue dot of the primary star.

 

Still, a neat article, and at least some scientific basis for my world

[DShomshak]

At some point I'd like to do something with a world in 3:2 resonance, like Mercury. Days and nights, but very long -- and because sometimes the planet's motion in its orbit is faster than its rotation, you might see the sun periodically reverse direction in its apparent motion across the sky.

 

I imagine a world with day and night each an Earth-month long. Dawn sees your local area frozen. As the sun slowly rises, the land thaws out. The Morning Ecosystem wakes up. For a time the land is lush with vegetation and animal life. But there are also powerful storms as the warming air interacts with the colder air of parts of the planet that are still cold. As the long day progresses, though, it gets hotter and drier. The plants and animals of morning spread their seeds and die, retreat to dens, and are otherwise replaced by the semiarid Noon and desert Afternoon ecosystems. As the sun slowly sets, the land slowly cools and the Evening ecosystem wakes up and takes over. The rains begin, and another band of storms reaching pole to pole. As twilight gives way to night, rain turns to sleet and snow. Gradually the land freezes and the hunters of the Night awaken.

 

And there are tides. Vast slow tides that rise and fall hundreds of feet, sweeping hundreds of miles in and out, so continents change shape over the course of the day. The immense Tidelands have their own cycle of ecologies. Only the swiftest travelers can cross them, either at high tide in boats or low tide by land, before the surging water dooms them.

 

It would be a great setting, I think, but a hell of a lot of work to design everything.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, toneight's NOVA episode, "Alien Planets Revealed," includes a segment on modeling climates for tide-locked worlds around red dwarf stars.

 

In brief: Windy.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Kraven Kor]

Incidentally, toneight's NOVA episode, "Alien Planets Revealed," includes a segment on modeling climates for tide-locked worlds around red dwarf stars.

 

In brief: Windy.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

My concept is that there is a constant weather cycle between the north and south hemispheres resulting in a very consistent pattern of near-daily storms and showers across most of the temperate equatorial to tropical zone - the region which has a day / night cycle.

 

These storms follow nearly the same path every day; they boil up out of the southern seas (the south pole, which faces the sun, is all ocean with most of the water of the planet kind of "pulled" toward the south) and then roll north.  The areas the storms traverse are tropical, wet, and lush; the bands between the storm tracks dry and arid.  The moisture then freezes at the "twilight circle" (above which the closer sun never shines, and it has a half-year-long day where the more distant blue dwarf star provides a sort of twilight-day) and there is a massive glacial wall that quickly builds up above that latitude.