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Gliese 581 d (aka Cuz; a real planet for speculation
Topic Started: Jan 26 2010, 01:25 PM (3,962 Views)
Canis Lupis
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_d



Here in "The Habitable Zone" forum, we mostly make fictional worlds to evolve life for. The only exceptions I've seen are Europa and Mars.

But in 2007, a team of Chilean scientists headed by Stephen Udry discovered a world that could actually support life outside of our solar system.

Gliese 581 d is the fourth planet orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581.

For ease of typing, let's come up with a nickname for Gliese 581 and it's system. Any ideas?

I'm going to make this an open project. Is anyone able to make worlds in Celestia willing to create Gliese 581 d? I know it is already on Celestia, but I would like to be able to see a hypothetical surface from space.

This world, according to Stephen Udry and a lot of other scientists, is likely an ocean planet with a few sparse areas of land. So whoever does this in Celestia needs to take that into account.




Now let's speculate!

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lamna
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Well if the volcanic activity has any effect, that depends on how thick the ice layer is. If it's quite deep then it won't be able to penetrate.
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Oceaniis
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lamna
Jan 28 2010, 04:58 PM
If it's quite deep then it won't be able to penetrate.
Why?? This ice (ice VI or VII) is denser than the gases (at this pressures they would be supercritical fluids) of the eruption, so it would make a chimeny like a volcano on the Ice VI or ice VII's surface
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Canis Lupis
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Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the Earth.

Besides, the ice would only form at the sea bed. The entire ocean would not be ice.
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lamna
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Quote:
 
Besides, the ice would only form at the sea bed. The entire ocean would not be ice.

It does not have to cover the world, but if it is thick enougth not much is going break though. How thick is this layer going to be anyway?
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Oceaniis
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Thousands of Kms thick, it would be like a mantle, with an ocean crust, but I don't see any problem in having convection
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lamna
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Maybe you are right, but I doubt the oceans would be as rich as earth. Anything that dies will sink and get frozen in ice, taking it's nutrients out of the ecosystem.
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Oceaniis
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With more than 7 earth's mass, and a lot of tidal forces from the star the amount of heat released would be enormous! That heat need to excape to space, the bottom would be warmer than the layers above, a lot of convection would form, the volcanos would be mush bigger, I magine a huge underwater geyser on the icy botttom, heated by the magma under it forming huge rising column of heated water, large columns can prevent the inner super heated water to cool down, keeping the minerals diluted...
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Venatosaurus
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Hmmm.. Now are these scientists sure that this world has no continents ? Could this planet simply be 'flooded' ?



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Oceaniis
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Calculating its dencity, I think... low dencity in small planets normaly is associated to water worlds... like jupiter moons
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Venatosaurus
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Well if so then this planet could potentially have 'sea-beds' that are nutrient rich and provide a stable living community for a majority of marine species, resulting in higher diversity... Imagine how diverse a 'reef' could be that covers and entire continents, especially on an alien planet ! So yes, when speculating about this water world, we should also take into account that possibility of continents ;)



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T.Neo
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The silicates lie thousands of kilometers within the planet. There would be no continental masses of any kind- the geology would differ from a usual terrestrial planet entirely.

I doubt the ice allotrope could form continents because it would depend on the high pressure of the depths to exist.

The ocean "crust" is probably pretty deep as well... too deep for reefs to form at the bottom. I doubt that life itself could exist at those high pressures.

Volcanism would probably be pretty major as well, due to tidal forces. And the ice would undoubtedly convect due to heat from the core. It isn't like the ice that floats in your drink- it's ice formed by extremely high pressures. I can see "hotspot" eruptions through the ice from the silicate core bringing nutrients to the surface.

A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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lamna
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With all that volcanism being pushed down by pressured ice either the heat will dissipate and cool because it's trapped for so long, or the seabed will keep exploding.
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This Ice isn't like the ice that we know, it wouldn't be cold, ice VII is like a rock, and don't forget, the planet is huge, it have a lot of heat to release, since the surface/volume ratio is very low, it would behave like Neptune, which produce much more heat than it receives from the sun, the plate tectonics would be very fast and the plates small, very chaotic too
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Quote:
 
This Ice isn't like the ice that we know, it wouldn't be cold, ice VII is like a rock,


Correct. It's hard to imagine it, but this ice is nothing like ice floating in a drinks glass.

Could people PLEASE get their heads around this. It isn't normal ice...

Gliese 581d, on top of being a larger (and thus hotter at the core) planet, experiences huge tidal heating from it's parent star. So I would imagine it would be very, very active.

Quote:
 
or the seabed will keep exploding.


Good to know, since there isn't anything living there.

A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Yes, I did see a documentary about this planet. Isn't it amazing how simple pressure can completely alter the state of the water. If there are even volcanic vents down there, I'd imagine it'd be quite hard to find any sort of life down there, I mean it'd be quite difficult to survive under such pressure, I'm not even sure microbes could be down there.



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