Re: A newcomer here

Wilson Heydt wrote: 
In article <1h2iifw.1fahmba1nptncwN%mbottorff@xxxxxxx>,
Michelle Bottorff <mbottorff@xxxxxxx> wrote:
If we were talking science fiction, I rather thought we couldn't get a
sun small enough that it had less mass than an "earthlike" planet. 

If anyone has a notion of how to get one, though, I'd love to hear about
it.  I could *do* stuff with that.


Small enough diameter is easy enough.  Use a white dwarf.  Mass is
another issue altoghter, plus explaining how you have a habitable
planet orbiting a reasonable distance from the white dwarf, 'cause
it sure isn't going to be that way while the star gets that way.

Well, it's possible to have a planet with earth-levels of gravity and arbitrarily high mass, so long as one doesn't mind having a hollow planet. (And, at some point way up in the "arbitrarily high" scale, the planet's crust starts becoming remarkably thin....)

So, you could have this tremendous beach-ball of a planet, carefully constructed near a white dwarf, with the white dwarf orbiting around it in a manner very reminiscent of the sun-god's chariot driving by overhead. If the orbital distance is small enough relative to the diameter of the planet, you then get only a small swath of land under the sun's path that actually gets much sunlight, and the nights are much longer than the days. And there's this tremendous realm of dark cold land (or maybe ocean) outside the lit areas, which may or may not harbor monsters.

Making a hollow beach-ball planet strong enough to avoid self-collapse and to avoid breaking apart with the tidal forces is, of course, an interesting exercise.

- Brooks


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