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Draconis, Planet of Terror; Living planet orbitting pulsar
Topic Started: Nov 2 2013, 05:19 PM (1,858 Views)
Deathbite42
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What if planets were alive? And how do they end up around pulsars? This series goes with the game Evolution Revolution, attached, but it is more of an Alternative Evo/Future, while this is Habitable Zone. They are connected in a very strange way, which will be sen later. Here goes:
The planet is known as Draconis. He orbits a pulsar, known as Flash. His moons are known as Phaeton and Lucifer. Being a pulsar, Flash is super dense; it is two solar masses, but only the size of Manhattan Island. It is 100,000 Kelvin. Draconis is one Earth mass, no mistake, as he built our planet in His image. His orbit is an extreme ellipse, and He is tidally locked to Flash. Phaeton is about the size of the moon, (again, not an accident) but is very close to the planet, about 50,000 km. Lucifer is a bit further, 100,000 km, and is 3 times the size of the moon. Both orbits are almost completely circular. But a pulsar is the remnant of the largest explosion since the Big Bang, so why is there a planet orbiting it? And why is there life? Join us next time, for these questions and more, on Draconis, Planet of Terror.
Please make suggestions as to how I can improve.
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citrakayah
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And this works how?
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Deathbite42
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Last time, we visited the star system Flash, which is an impossible place. The star is a pulsar, the remnant of the most powerful explosion in the universe, yet it has a planet orbiting it. How it survived is a sublime enigma with a simple answer; it didn't. All stars form from clouds of gas and dust left over from a supernova, and therefore, the same is true of all planets. The only difference here is that this supernova left something behind: an ultra-dense neutron star, specifically a pulsar. This sucked up some of this matter, but the rest went to Draconis. Now skip a few billion years into the future, and you will see the planet has been spliced into four parts, because of its lack of days and nights. The first is a radioactive wasteland covered in luminous crystal. The second only feels this effect so strongly with longer wavelengths, resulting in a vast desert where water evaporates on the ground. However, it has massive mountains known as the Blade Islands which create cooler shadows where life can form, the largest being the Northern Sea. The third region is the safest: Equatoria. It is covered by a vast ocean with one large continent, also called Equatoria. Its features include the Alpha Peninsula and the Sky Mountains separating them from most of Equatoria, the Great River, covering its surface, and a lake known as the All-Seeing Eye. The final region is Shadowland, dominated by the continent of the same name. Its major feature is the Fang Mountains on it. The All-Seeing Eye is where life began, for a most unusual reason This will be shown next time.
Edited by Deathbite42, Nov 2 2013, 05:45 PM.
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Deathbite42
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citrakayah
Nov 2 2013, 05:29 PM
And this works how?
Read the next post.
Edited by Deathbite42, Nov 2 2013, 05:46 PM.
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colddigger
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How is that a living planet and you mean split not spliced.
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Zerraspace
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There are two major issues I see with this project, both of which require serious justification, the first of these being how the planet can be alive, the second being how one could maintain habitable temperatures on a pulsar planet. There are real pulsar planets (Wikipedia has a good entry here), but as pulsars tend to be much less luminous than stars (at least if you're facing the emissions beam), the planet would have to be far closer to maintain an Earth-like temperature, and I daresay at the appropriate distance, such a planet would either be sterilized (if not blown away) by the intense radiation, or torn apart by the intense gravity and tidal forces. As is, Draconis will be too cold to support any liquid water - maybe even too cold to support an atmosphere - and you'd be better off orbiting another type of star if you wish otherwise.

A wholly living planet, I daresay is impossible, firstly because the pressures and temperatures developed as one delves further in would destroy any compound I could care to mention (and I cannot begin to imagine how you could create a life-form from molten iron and silicates), secondly because there would be no source of possible biomass save other components of the planet itself (which would make the planet self-cannibalizing), and thirdly because there is no energy source that could provide for the whole outrageous mass (the sun certainly doesn't provide enough to descend through its whole depth, and chemical compounds would have to be regenerated by another source). At most you might manage an organic film covering the planet with a few meters' depth (and if I were to be more conservative, I would say only centimeters), but that's as far as you could go towards realistically creating a living planet.

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Now skip a few billion years into the future, and you will see the planet has been spliced into four parts, because of its lack of days and nights.


This suggests that the planet is tidally locked - that one side faces the star at all times and the other faces away - and its rotation rate is equivalent to the time it takes to circle the star. Due to tidal effects, you can't have a moon that orbits a tidally locked planet in less time than it would take to orbit the star. At 50000 km, your moon would take about a day to orbit, and at 100000 km, it would take some 6 days: closer than this, and they will spin closer and closer till they crash into the planet. If your planet orbited the star in less time than this, they would lie outside the planet's Hill Sphere and the star would strip them away. Suffice to say, moons around tidally locked planets for any period of time are just about impossible. You should either take away the moons or enforce a rotation rate.

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Draconis is one Earth mass, no mistake, as he built our planet in His image.


You speak of this Draconis as if he were a deity. I cannot comment on that - only that if you are about to involve the supernatural, you cannot expect us to give feedback on the natural as we can't identify boundaries between the two. It will also agitate reviewers here, as the excuse can be applied to any factor you like...


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All stars form from clouds of gas and dust left over from a supernova, and therefore, the same is true of all planets.


That's true of most modern stars and planets, but not of all of them, and that can be gleaned from the very statement itself: clearly there must have been stars that did not form from supernova to give rise to the supernova that would form later bodies. Those would be the universe's first stars, formed from the hydrogen/helium remnants of the Big Bang, and the earliest planets (which would have all been gas giants, as there weren't any ice/rock elements to compose them yet) could have also formed from this. Your saying is more true of terrestrial planets, but even a few of these are thought to be remnants of stars stripped of their outer gaseous layers (such as PSR J1719-1438 b, which is itself a pulsar planet).
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That is how we first set foot on the planet we have come to know as Zainter, the world that would change our lives forever.
- Remake of Zainter
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Deathbite42
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Nov 3 2013, 02:20 AM
There are two major issues I see with this project, both of which require serious justification, the first of these being how the planet can be alive, the second being how one could maintain habitable temperatures on a pulsar planet. There are real pulsar planets (Wikipedia has a good entry here), but as pulsars tend to be much less luminous than stars (at least if you're facing the emissions beam), the planet would have to be far closer to maintain an Earth-like temperature, and I daresay at the appropriate distance, such a planet would either be sterilized (if not blown away) by the intense radiation, or torn apart by the intense gravity and tidal forces. As is, Draconis will be too cold to support any liquid water - maybe even too cold to support an atmosphere - and you'd be better off orbiting another type of star if you wish otherwise.

A wholly living planet, I daresay is impossible, firstly because the pressures and temperatures developed as one delves further in would destroy any compound I could care to mention (and I cannot begin to imagine how you could create a life-form from molten iron and silicates), secondly because there would be no source of possible biomass save other components of the planet itself (which would make the planet self-cannibalizing), and thirdly because there is no energy source that could provide for the whole outrageous mass (the sun certainly doesn't provide enough to descend through its whole depth, and chemical compounds would have to be regenerated by another source). At most you might manage an organic film covering the planet with a few meters' depth (and if I were to be more conservative, I would say only centimeters), but that's as far as you could go towards realistically creating a living planet.

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Now skip a few billion years into the future, and you will see the planet has been spliced into four parts, because of its lack of days and nights.


This suggests that the planet is tidally locked - that one side faces the star at all times and the other faces away - and its rotation rate is equivalent to the time it takes to circle the star. Due to tidal effects, you can't have a moon that orbits a tidally locked planet in less time than it would take to orbit the star. At 50000 km, your moon would take about a day to orbit, and at 100000 km, it would take some 6 days: closer than this, and they will spin closer and closer till they crash into the planet. If your planet orbited the star in less time than this, they would lie outside the planet's Hill Sphere and the star would strip them away. Suffice to say, moons around tidally locked planets for any period of time are just about impossible. You should either take away the moons or enforce a rotation rate.

Quote:
 
Draconis is one Earth mass, no mistake, as he built our planet in His image.


You speak of this Draconis as if he were a deity. I cannot comment on that - only that if you are about to involve the supernatural, you cannot expect us to give feedback on the natural as we can't identify boundaries between the two. It will also agitate reviewers here, as the excuse can be applied to any factor you like...


Quote:
 
All stars form from clouds of gas and dust left over from a supernova, and therefore, the same is true of all planets.


That's true of most modern stars and planets, but not of all of them, and that can be gleaned from the very statement itself: clearly there must have been stars that did not form from supernova to give rise to the supernova that would form later bodies. Those would be the universe's first stars, formed from the hydrogen/helium remnants of the Big Bang, and the earliest planets (which would have all been gas giants, as there weren't any ice/rock elements to compose them yet) could have also formed from this. Your saying is more true of terrestrial planets, but even a few of these are thought to be remnants of stars stripped of their outer gaseous layers (such as PSR J1719-1438 b, which is itself a pulsar planet).
There are other heat sources you may not have expected-primordial and radiogenic. After all, Jupiter reflects more energy than it captures, correct? More importantly, the orbit is highly elliptical, so there are points in which it would be destroyed if it stayed there permanently and points where it would be too cold if it stayed there permanently. But it doesn't.

Living planet:
1. I need to find out if it is possible to have a sort of bubble where pressures and temperatures are less extreme. If so, I will include that next time.
2. The planet is indeed self-cannibalizing, but only on the parts wholly unnecessary for His survival. He has a very slow metabolism, so He can survive on that, material that crosses His orbit, and the many sacrificed to Him every year by His armies. This will also be included later.
3. What if the pressure and temperature you mentioned, AND primordial/radiogenic heat were combined? Please tell me if that would be sufficient.

Good idea, I will enforce a rotation rate.

He is a deity, but He is by no means supernatural; His majestic powers are derived only from science and His trillions of worshippers across the galaxy.

Indeed, but those stars should be long gone by now, and that is largely irrelevant.
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Zerraspace
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There are other heat sources you may not have expected-primordial and radiogenic. After all, Jupiter reflects more energy than it captures, correct?


Jupiter also receives only one twenty-fourth the energy that the Earth does from the sun: if you were to place it in our orbit, the above statement would no longer be true, and the sun would outshine Jupiter by nearly twenty-four times. Similarly, Neptune radiates more energy than it receives from the sun, but since it receives only some one nine-hundredth the energy the Earth does, this is not nearly as significant as it first appears. There are two other factors to consider in the analysis. Firstly, Jupiter's enormous volume allows it to hold onto significantly more heat, and it has one eleventh the surface area that Earth does relative to its volume, which is to say that it's dissipating this greater heat of formation even more slowly. Secondly, Jupiter has a potent source of heat production that the Earth lacks, which is its own gravitational compression - it's so massive that it is essentially crushing itself under its own gravity.

When we draw the comparison with planet Earth, it's a much bleaker picture. Earth and Venus are possibly the only terrestrial planets massive enough to maintain molten innards - Mars and Mercury are suspected to have solidified wholly - and it didn't take long for Earth to lose significant surface heat. Only 800 million years after formation the formerly molten ball of rock had cooled enough to host liquid water - it transferred from several thousands of degrees Kelvin to only a few hundred in a fraction of the period it's suspected would be necessary to generate an oxidizing atmosphere (some 2.5 billion years on Earth), and this was when it had more radioisotopes to actively provide heat.

Apparently the Earth gives off some 44 TW of geothermal energy, or 86 mW/m2, less than a ten thousandth what it receives from the sun. There is enormous heat energy overall, it is true, but the laws of thermodynamics will make it a hassle trying to use any of it - heat engines require a low temperature heat sink, and the heat disposed of can only be used if you can find an even lower temperature sink. Essentially the most efficient heat engine, a Carnot Cycle, is limited to efficiency of (1-(Tsink/Theat source)) x 100 %, and note all temperatures are in Kelvin (add 273 degrees to any temperature in Celsius to get degrees Kelvin). The heat gradient on Earth is about 25 C per kilometer, so if you could somehow reach across that distance, your Carnot engine could run at efficiency of some (1-(298/(298+25))x100 = 7.7%, and true efficiency is always going to be lower (real heat engines typically run at half or less their optimal efficiencies). The only way to increase efficiency past this is to reach even farther, and pretty soon the temperatures will destroy whatever equipment you're trying to use to harness it.

In short, not only is it insufficient, but the energy form isn't even readily available for access.

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More importantly, the orbit is highly elliptical, so there are points in which it would be destroyed if it stayed there permanently and points where it would be too cold if it stayed there permanently. But it doesn't.


You could say that of the temperature, but not of destruction: the planet can store heat from when it was closer, but it can't change the gravity. The moment it comes too close it will start falling apart - your planet will come out as a pile of rubble that may try to pull itself back together, but that will only last until it orbits back into that spot.

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He is a deity, but He is by no means supernatural; His majestic powers are derived only from science and His trillions of worshippers across the galaxy.


Is it artificial then? I hesitate to guess the purpose of such a creation... We cannot rule out that science can perform such feats, insofar as science cannot state anything to be truly impossible, but by our current understanding of science, we could not even begin to guess at how it could be done, let alone what processes it would require. As such, discussion regarding this cannot be scientific, in that we cannot bring to terms real world science for the matter. However, this is SE, where all discussions aim to be as scientific as possible, and by bringing this here you are admitting to a desire for scientific discussion: except where obvious, you must ground all your justifications in real world human science.

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Indeed, but those stars should be long gone by now, and that is largely irrelevant.


This is a scientific forum, so we try to be technically correct wherever possible: it helps clear up misunderstandings. Since one of the means of non-nova related creation did involve pulsar planets, the information could be useful for this discussion.
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That is how we first set foot on the planet we have come to know as Zainter, the world that would change our lives forever.
- Remake of Zainter
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citrakayah
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You still need to explain how a planet can be intelligent. Is he artificial? That would make things easier.
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colddigger
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Why are we calling a hunk of rock a he anyway?

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Deathbite42
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Zerraspace
Nov 3 2013, 02:01 PM
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More importantly, the orbit is highly elliptical, so there are points in which it would be destroyed if it stayed there permanently and points where it would be too cold if it stayed there permanently. But it doesn't.


You could say that of the temperature, but not of destruction: the planet can store heat from when it was closer, but it can't change the gravity. The moment it comes too close it will start falling apart - your planet will come out as a pile of rubble that may try to pull itself back together, but that will only last until it orbits back into that spot.

Quote:
 
He is a deity, but He is by no means supernatural; His majestic powers are derived only from science and His trillions of worshippers across the galaxy.


Is it artificial then? I hesitate to guess the purpose of such a creation... We cannot rule out that science can perform such feats, insofar as science cannot state anything to be truly impossible, but by our current understanding of science, we could not even begin to guess at how it could be done, let alone what processes it would require. As such, discussion regarding this cannot be scientific, in that we cannot bring to terms real world science for the matter. However, this is SE, where all discussions aim to be as scientific as possible, and by bringing this here you are admitting to a desire for scientific discussion: except where obvious, you must ground all your justifications in real world human science.
Exactly, the planet partially disintegrates each perihelion, but then He pulls back together. I just realized, this could be how He survives; pressure and temperature lower at that point because the upper shard comes off. Afterwards, the planet kind of hibernates (estivates), which is the reason for His low metabolism. The pulsar's beam is a great energy source as well.

Most of His powers derive from the science we know, but a very tiny amount are based on those we are only now beginning to understand e.g. quantum mechanics. He is artificial in that He was made by an ancient, now dead, alien race as the ultimate weapon, and in that His mind is stored in a massive supercomputer hidden deep underground in the Radlands.
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citrakayah
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I'm sorry, but just saying "quantum mechanics" isn't going to fly around here.
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Deathbite42
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What do you have against quantum mechanics? I am referring to the quantum mechanics we have not actually discovered, but is close enough to the Standard Model to be plausible.
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citrakayah
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I have nothing 'against' quantum mechanics. What I have a problem with is that you are handwaving these things with absolutely no explanation, whatsoever, as to what they are. I'd try to be helpful, but there's absolutely nothing to go on.
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Deathbite42
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I explained it, that's what this thread is.
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