Timeline for Can a planet have a warm, tropical climate both at the poles and at the equator?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
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| Jun 28 at 6:16 | comment | added | Mon | The distribution/location of continental land masses and their impact on ocean currents will also help i.e. land masses that divert warm water from the equatorial regions of the planet to it's poles and hence to other northerly/southerly land masses. | |
| Jun 27 at 17:02 | comment | added | Sarah Messer | L1 isn't stable, but L4 & L5 are, and would allow you to put two suns in the sky. There'd still be day/night cycles, but day would be longer than night... or you'd want to distinguish based on the number of visible stars: 0, 1, or 2 depending on location & time. You'd never have more than 1 directly overhead, which I think would make days longer without making them much more intense. A substantial axial tilt would then spread the energy around on longer-than-diurnal time scales. | |
| Jun 27 at 14:35 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 27 at 13:48 | comment | added | Nuclear Hoagie | Geographic tropics are defined as the region of the planet where the sun may appear directly overhead at some point during the year. A planet with no axial tilt only ever sees the sun directly above the equator - geographically, it's not a planet that's all tropics, it's a planet that has no tropics other than the zero-area line defining the equator. Land in the geographic tropics need not be climatically tropic, I think it goes too far to say the planet is definitionally all tropical - there's nothing precluding icy mountains or arid deserts, or the poles simply being cold. | |
| Jun 27 at 13:36 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @nick The scientific definition of the tropical, temperate, and arctic zones are a bit different than most people's colloquial understanding of them. These zones are not defined by how hot or humid they are, but by how the experience seasons based on the plant's tilt; so, by definition, a planet with no tilt is 100% tropical zone, even if some parts of it are cooler than others. | |
| Jun 27 at 13:29 | comment | added | Nosajimiki | @LocustHorde I did consider the possibility of a planet at a 45 degree tilt being in an L1 orbit between 2 stars where the year equals about 3 days which would give the whole planet equal total light, but L1 orbits are not naturally stable. | |
| Jun 27 at 7:56 | comment | added | Themoonisacheese | @LocustHorde: conceptually yes; you'd just be moving the equator across the planet all the time, however you then have a problem in that you need a force to change the axis all the time. the easiest explanation (that probably doesn't make sense) i can think of would be that the crust of the planet is freely spinning chaotically with the wind around the core. | |
| Jun 27 at 7:42 | comment | added | LocustHorde | Insanely stupid question, but what if the planet doesn't just rotate in 1 axis, what if it rotated in every conceivable axii such that each part of the planet gets equal sun? Is that even possible? | |
| Jun 27 at 6:23 | comment | added | nick | Re: Smaller Axial Tilt -> This would still lead to the poles getting significantly less sunlight then the equatorial regions. I was thinking, how about a larger tilt and a very short year to make up for it instead ? The would place the planet closer to its star ofc, don't know if one could make this work temperature wise.. | |
| Jun 26 at 19:29 | history | edited | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 26 at 19:19 | history | answered | Nosajimiki | CC BY-SA 4.0 |