I heard that red dwarfs are less stable than stars like our sun, and that being too close to the star exposes the planet to solar flares/wind and radiation that wipes out the atmosphere. Is this inevitable or is there a possibility for these planets to preserve their atmosphere?
For Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_dwarf_planets
I have been fascinated with tidally locked planets for a while now, and I've been trying to learn more and more about them and I read that it's more likely for a star system to be binary than not. So i was wondering if a binary red dwarf system would affect the location of the Goldilocks zone, and the distance from a star a planet is able to be tidally locked, and if those two zones would still intersect.
It seems to me that for a planet to be in the habitable zone of a red dwarf, it would have to so close that it would be tidally locked. In addition, many red dwarfs are volatile and any planets in that relatively close habitable zone are in danger from flares. So is it actually possible for a non-tidally locked, Earth-sized and "climatized" planet to exist around a red dwarf?
Also, in my book, there are powerful Elder machines that manipulate gravity. Would using them to capture said asteroids change anything (as opposed to more conventional methods like rockets)?
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 54%. (I'm a bot)
> Despite its new, somewhat less prestigious classification as a dwarf planet, NASA is still mighty interested in what Pluto might be hiding.
> Now, NASA researchers are suggesting that a vast ocean might be tucked away under Pluto's icy crust and, in a rare move, they're even suggesting that Pluto may support life deep below its surface.
> The key factor in Pluto's potential to support liquid water beneath its surface, and thereby life, is the existence of its moons.
> Trans-Neptunian objects like Pluto are so far away from the sun that the heat from the star simply isn't enough to keep a surface ocean from freezing solid, but tidal heating might still allow liquid water to slosh around underneath.
> After objects like Pluto formed, radioactive decay may have produced the initial heat to form the ocean from water ice, but once the surface froze it would need the friction of gravity to keep it from going solid once more, much like a fast-moving stream can fight off freezing temperatures.
> At present, there are no concrete plans to explore the possibility of liquid water or life hidden away beneath Pluto's surface, but that could change.
Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Pluto^#1 water^#2 heat^#3 surface^#4 life^#5
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Rules:
•Ceres will crash directly into the Earth exactly 20 years from the date that we discover it’s hurtling towards us
•Every government on Earth has decided to cooperate on this critical task. This means we have the full brainpower of humanity at our disposal, as well as every government diverting as much of its funds as possible to finding a solution.
•Ceres-truthers and other forms of organized idiocy have no effect on the outcome of the scenario
I'm working on a science fiction setting in which a small planet orbits a brown dwarf. A group of crash survivors live in a crater at the north pole. The climate is temperate but dark, akin to a summer's evening. The warmth comes partially from the planet itself (for reasons that can't be revealed quite yet).
The sun stays low against the horizon, visible perhaps due to refraction in the atmosphere or from the permanent rain/fog at the crater's lip.
I've done some basic research but I'd love to hear whether /r/askscience thinks this is feasible. If it's not entirely plausible, do you feel you could maintain a suspension of disbelief in such a setting?
Let me expand on this question a bit. I know that you're not going to have a planet orbiting a G2V sequence star like the Sun with a radius >1 solar radii, but what about a red dwarf? For example, the largest known exoplanet, WASP-17b, has a radius of around 1.9x Jupiter radii (per Wikipedia), so maybe around 139,000 kilometers. The star Proxima Centauri's radius is roughly 100,900 kilometers (again, per Wikipedia), smaller than that of WASP-17b by about 38,100 kilometers. Could it be possible for a planet the size and density of WASP-17b to exist around a red dwarf star the size and density of Proxima Centauri (or smaller)? And would a transit as seen from Earth by such a planet appear to completely block out the light of its parent star?
