Astrophile

Newbie
Aug 30, 2013
2,290
1,533
76
England
✟236,547.00
Country
United Kingdom
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Widowed
That's why a student in high school in 1970 can get a good grade for drawing a solar system with nine planets; and a student in 2020 can get a good grade for drawing a solar system with eight.
A student in 2020 would get a better grade for drawing a solar system with eight planets plus an asteroid belt (including the dwarf planet Ceres), the Kuiper belt (including Pluto, Eris and other dwarf planets), and the Oort cloud.
 
Upvote 0

AV1611VET

SCIENCE CAN TAKE A HIKE
Site Supporter
Jun 18, 2006
3,851,782
51,644
Guam
✟4,951,787.00
Country
United States
Faith
Baptist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Republican
A student in 2020 would get a better grade for drawing a solar system with eight planets plus an asteroid belt (including the dwarf planet Ceres), the Kuiper belt (including Pluto, Eris and other dwarf planets), and the Oort cloud.

^_^
 
Upvote 0

AlexB23

Christian
CF Ambassadors
Site Supporter
Aug 11, 2023
4,763
2,934
24
WI
✟159,523.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
Gosh, I never realised Galileo was under house arrest when he was only 10! :)
I was 10 when I got that book on tape. :) Galileo was not 10 when he was arrested. Haha... good one
 
  • Like
Reactions: Astrophile
Upvote 0

AlexB23

Christian
CF Ambassadors
Site Supporter
Aug 11, 2023
4,763
2,934
24
WI
✟159,523.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
Thou shalt not drift o.t.
Thou shall drift.


Verb: The act or activity of steering an automobile so that it makes a controlled skid sideways through a turn with the front wheels pointed in a direction opposite to that of the turn. (Dictionary link)

Drifting began in the early 1980s with a Japanese race-car driver named Keiichi Tsuchiya. Mr. Tsuchiya, who was in his 20s, started experimenting with drifting and practiced it on curvy roads deep in the mountains near his hometown. He says he was perfecting his ability to not spin out on curves in car races.

—Norihiko Shirouzu et al.

1713313137766.jpeg
 
Upvote 0

AlexB23

Christian
CF Ambassadors
Site Supporter
Aug 11, 2023
4,763
2,934
24
WI
✟159,523.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
Thou shalt not muzzle the Alex that trotteth out the facts.
Thank you for defending me, brother. It is good that we both agree on using more modern tone, and not always use the KJV style of English. :)
 
Upvote 0
This site stays free and accessible to all because of donations from people like you.
Consider making a one-time or monthly donation. We appreciate your support!
- Dan Doughty and Team Christian Forums

The Liturgist

Traditional Liturgical Christian
Site Supporter
Nov 26, 2019
11,529
5,865
49
The Wild West
✟496,720.00
Country
United States
Faith
Generic Orthodox Christian
Marital Status
Celibate
Out of curiosity, could a moon be made of gas?

That's an intriguing question. I'm interested in planetary formation from the standpoint of an armchair amateur, but the proper answer is probably above that paygrade.

The gas planets are thought to form at a stage in the process where the stellar nebula of gas and dust still has a substantial mass. The dust accumulates into clumps, through collision then gravitational attraction, which build up to form planetesimals, which accrete to larger bodies which may go on to become asteroids, moons, or planets. But some become the core of the gas and ice giants that attract the remaining gas within the nebula. These planetary cores are thought to be five or ten time the mass of the Earth.

I find it unlikely that these could then wind up as a moon - they would just be to big - but that may simply be lack of imagination on my part. And I don't think they could accumulate significant gas without being massive to begin that process. On balance, then, highly unlikely, but in a rather large universe I hesitat to say impossible. Fortunately there are others on the forum who likely know the answer.

I would think in rare cases you could potentially have, for a time at least, a binary gas giant with two gas giants of similar mass orbiting each other. Additionally, a small, extremely heavy moon might be able to attract a great deal of atmosphere. At one time, it was thought the gas giants had rocky cores, which I think is unlikely, but here, in effect, I think one could have a moon with a large atmosphere and a highly massive core, which could itself be perhaps be a stellar fragment that wandered into a solar system. This is all unlikely, but I think it could happen in principle.

One thing I liked about Star Wars from an actual SF perspective is that it featured two gas giants: Bespin, which amazingly had what the Expanded Universe material which was canon until Disney bought the franchise described as having a habitable region in its atmosphere, and Endor, which was a gas giant orbited by the Forest Moon (on which the ewoks lived) which in turn was orbited by the second Death Star, although this last bit had some technical challenges; the second Death Star is described as being extremely massive in many sources, around nine times larger than the first one, and it is depicted in a very close orbit. So there are problems, but what I like is that Star Wars decided to use gas giants as a setting for stories, which is relatively uncommon in science fiction, and indeed Star Trek despite its conceit that it is more “scientific” than Star Trek has only very rarely featured a gas giant in any significant capacity. On the other hand, 2010 did a superb job with Jupiter, and the skiffy horror film Event Horizon made interesting use of Neptune as a backdrop.

Uranus and Neptune, even after the discovery by Voyager of how visually interesting Neptune is in appearance, have sadly not been very frequently featured in SF.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Chesterton
Upvote 0