Planets orbiting four stars and immensely long winters.

[Ahzoh]

After watching this video
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bHVkR3s9KX ... l=CA&guid=

I now feel like speculating the possibilities of planets orbiting FOUR stars, not two.
And having immensely long winters.

Could it be possible? How would it work? And how far or bright would the stars need to be to sustain *human* life, or alternatively, a race of thermophilic skeletal humanoids that normally live in volcanoes; the Ḵsīnesīr.

[Corphishy]

Oh, it happens, alright. And it's awesome. As for the whole calculations n junk for how likely a planet with life could be sustained, I'm a conlanger, not a miracle worker.

[Lambuzhao]

Oh, it happens, alright. And it's awesome. As for the whole calculations n junk for how likely a planet with life could be sustained, I'm a conlanger, not a miracle worker.

Hella-awesome.
Squadelphious, in fact!


I would imagine, since the planet itself is Neptune-sized (potentially) smaller gas-giant (or whatever they call 'em these days), it could have a moon that's Titan sized, which in turn could possibly support life.

Just wow.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, dear Walrus, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[Xonen]

Oh, it happens, alright. And it's awesome.

Well, strictly speaking, the planet still apparently only orbits two stars in this case; it's just that the same two stars are also orbited by another binary star... And perhaps somewhat disappointingly, Wikipedia tells me that the latter pair is 1000 AU away and its larger member is only about the size of our Sun. Which means that they'd look like, well, stars (or perhaps a star, as in a single one; I'm too lazy to calculate if the smaller one would be visible separately at that distance). For comparison, here's what the Sun looks like at less than a tenth of that distance:

Spoiler:

This is an artist's impression of noontime on Sedna, the farthest known planetoid from the Sun. Over 8 billion miles away, the Sun is reduced to a brilliant pinpoint of light that is 100 times brighter than the full Moon. (The Sun would actually be the angular size of Saturn as seen from Earth, way too small to be resolved with the human eye.)

So while this is certainly an interesting discovery, the effect on the planet's surface would still be of having two suns and perhaps an extra-bright star or two in the sky. Not that I doubt that itself being enough to make for some pretty awesome sunsets.

---

I would imagine, since the planet itself is Neptune-sized (potentially) smaller gas-giant (or whatever they call 'em these days), it could have a moon that's Titan sized, which in turn could possibly support life.

Not human life, though - and probably not even hyperthermophilic life in the terrestrial sense of that term. Too hot.

Of course, none of this means that the kind of setup the OP is looking for is impossible, just that PH1b does not quite qualify as a real-universe example of that. Make the stars orbiting further away a bit bigger, or maybe have the planet orbit a single star which in turn orbits around a triple-star system - and have the planet itself be somewhat further away from its star - and... well, I see no reason why it couldn't happen. Then again, I'm no astrophysicist, and have done precisely zero calculations to support this hypothesis, so take it with a planetoid of sodium chloride.

[Yačay256]

Not human life, though - and probably not even hyperpsychrophilic life in the terrestrial sense of that term. Too cold.

Of course, none of this means that the kind of setup the OP is looking for is impossible, just that PH1b does not quite qualify as a real-universe example of that. Make the stars orbiting further away a bit bigger, or maybe have the planet orbit a single star which in turn orbits around a triple-star system - and have the planet itself be somewhat further away from its star - and... well, I see no reason why it couldn't happen. Then again, I'm no astrophysicist, and have done precisely zero calculations to support this hypothesis, so take it with a planetoid of sodium chloride.

Is that what you meant? Or were you thinking of an environment similar to Io?

[Ahzoh]

Well my Ḵsīnesīr live in volcanoes and can hold molten iron in their hands like water...
Thermophillic enough?

[Click]

Your Ḵsīnesīr would probably require a completely different biochemistry.

[Xonen]

Not human life, though - and probably not even hyperpsychrophilic life in the terrestrial sense of that term. Too cold.

Of course, none of this means that the kind of setup the OP is looking for is impossible, just that PH1b does not quite qualify as a real-universe example of that. Make the stars orbiting further away a bit bigger, or maybe have the planet orbit a single star which in turn orbits around a triple-star system - and have the planet itself be somewhat further away from its star - and... well, I see no reason why it couldn't happen. Then again, I'm no astrophysicist, and have done precisely zero calculations to support this hypothesis, so take it with a planetoid of sodium chloride.

Is that what you meant?

I meant this:

PH1's temperature is estimated to range from a minimum of about 484 degrees Fahrenheit (251 degrees Celsius) to a maximum of 644 degrees (340 degrees C), far too hot to bear life.

Now, I'm aware that one should basically never trust the Daily Mail, but Wikipedia gives a similar figure (481 K) - though frustratingly, it doesn't mention a source for that. So if there's a more reliable source out there with radically different information on this, do please share.

[Ahzoh]

Your Ḵsīnesīr would probably require a completely different biochemistry.

The only plausible way I could imagine their existence is that archaebacteria somehow evolved into multicellular organism that still retain the cellwall vital to protecting the cell from the heat. I can of course ask to suspend some disbelief.

[Click]

I’d like you to take a look at this and do some research yourself.

[eldin raigmore]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bHVkR3s9KX ... l=CA&guid=

Thank you for starting this thread!

[Squall]

Binary stars
Trinary stars
Quaternary stars

We could put a planet in the center of mass of the stars and it would not have night.
Or a planet could be away from all of the stars and orbit them in the same way it would if there were a single star in the center of mass.

We could have long winters in orbits with high eccentricity.

There are star systems with a smaller star orbiting a larger star.
If the planet orbits the larger star, there will be some times that the second star will be away from the planet and the winter would happen during this time.


I will create a star system with a huge star. The year would be very long in the planet. The seasons would last for centuries.

[sangi39]

We could put a planet in the center of mass of the stars and it would not have night.

I can't see this sort of arrangement being stable. If it was in the exact centre, then it seems likely that the planet would eventually fall towards orbiting around just one star as a result of gravitational influences from other nearby bodies (planets orbiting one star or the other or large objects orbiting both stars).

Or a planet could be away from all of the stars and orbit them in the same way it would if there were a single star in the center of mass.

Geoff's Creating an Earthlike Planet has this to say:

The planet is at least five times as far away from both suns as they are from each other.
The planet is at least five times as far away from one sun as it is from the other.
The two suns are in a very nearly circular orbit around their barycentre and the planet makes an equilateral triangle with them. This is, I am informed, "the Lagrange points L4 and L5 cases

I haven't looked into it since then, because I didn't really have any interest in creating such a system, but this user on Youtube using Universe Sandbox seems to support that idea to a degree.

[Ànradh]

Geoff's Creating an Earthlike Planet

Ah! I never thought I'd see this again after the site I accessed it via sold its URL, but you just told its name.
*bookmarks*

[eldin raigmore]

It's not impossible that a planet's days and years and seasons might strike its inhabitants as "chaotic" even if they aren't. If the periodicity is complicated (as it will be if there are two periods involved whose lengths have an irrational ratio) and one or more of the periods are very long compared to a "human(oid)" life-span, the days and seasons could be completely predictable in a theoretical sense, yet it could be many tens of thousands (or more) of generations before the inhabitants had enough observational history recorded to be able to detect the pattern. For example look how long it took humanity to figure out the regularities of Earth's Ice Ages.

Also, a process that is deterministic at one dimensionality may be chaotic at the next lower dimensionality. For instance if there are four bodies (say, a big star, a little star, a gas giant planet, and a habitable planet) orbiting each other and a "snapshot" is taken each time all four are on the same plane, the sequence may very well appear chaotic. And nobody has solved the n-body problem for n>3 anyway except in unnaturally easy cases, like, all the bodies have the same mass and they are all orbiting the same point at the same distance with the same orbital momentum and they occupy the vertices of a regular polygon.

I do not know whether any of that applies to the world of A Song of Ice and Fire.

[Xonen]

The only plausible way I could imagine their existence is that archaebacteria somehow evolved into multicellular organism that still retain the cellwall vital to protecting the cell from the heat.

The cell wall, at least alone, doesn't do much to protect the cell from heat; after all, water passes through it all the time! Which means that the temperature inside an archaeon is pretty much the same as outside it, which in turn is why:

the current record growth temperature is 122 °C, for Methanopyrus kandleri [and] it is thought unlikely that microbes could survive at temperatures above 150 °C

Now, I suppose a multicellular organism might theoretically evolve some kind of heat-shielding exoskeleton, but even that might be stretching it... I think your best bet might indeed be to look into some kind of completely different biochemistry.

---

I will create a star system with a huge star. The year would be very long in the planet. The seasons would last for centuries.

I think there might be a couple of problems with this... Mainly that hypergiants only last a few million years, at most. In fact, even counting the time the star spends on the main sequence before becoming a hypergiant, there would likely still be only barely enough time for planets to form at all, much less planets containing life (which would presumably be the aim of a conworld, no?).

I found this neat tool for calculating the habitable zone around a star at different stages of its evolution. Unfortunately, it only has a limited number of options for the initial star mass; to get a star that reaches a size comparable to VY CMa before going supernova, 30 solar masses is pretty much your only option there. Then, the best possible odds for a life-sustaining planet are to place it at an initial distance of about 465 AU (at the outer edge of the initial habitable zone). In this case, you get about six million years before the star (possibly) becomes a hypergiant - and less than half a million years after that before the planet becomes uninhabitable due to the star's decreasing luminosity.

Furthermore, it might even be that planet formation simply doesn't occur around the most massive stars at all. Just yesterday, I got the new issue of Tähdet ja avaruus magazine in the mail, and it briefly references a recent study which apparently claims just that: the radiation pressure around massive stars destroys their protoplanetary disks too rapidly for planets to form.

---

We could put a planet in the center of mass of the stars and it would not have night.

I can't see this sort of arrangement being stable. If it was in the exact centre, then it seems likely that the planet would eventually fall towards orbiting around just one star as a result of gravitational influences from other nearby bodies (planets orbiting one star or the other or large objects orbiting both stars).

There's also the question of how a planet would end up there in the first place. AFAIU, the center of gravity between two stars is just normal, empty space; it has no gravity of its own nor anything to stop a moving object from simply passing through it. Yet this would obviously require a large amount of mass to reach that spot and then somehow come to a full stop right there.

[Ahzoh]

Ok, so what kind of biochemistry might allow for a multicellular organism to survive extreme temperatures of at least 2000 degrees centigrade?

Mind you, unrealistically, I might attribute this heat-shielding to supernatural forces.

Also, I just wanted a conplanet whereyou could see four suns simultaniously, at any point of the day.
Maybe Sun 1 is starting to set while Sun 2 and 3 begin to rise, at some point midway before 2 set, Sun 4 begins to rise, then the cycle repeats

[eldin raigmore]

Ok, so what kind of biochemistry might allow for a multicellular organism to survive extreme temperatures of at least 2000 degrees centigrade?

Not one based on long-chain molecules of covalently-bonded non-metal atoms.
They can't survive temperatures higher than about 700 degrees Centigrade.
That is, not even the biochemicals themselves can survive such high temperatures, much less the organisms composed of them.

Some Earthly organisms build themselves shells out of materials consisting mostly of, say, calcium compounds or silicon compounds. Maybe that could happen on the planet you're thinking of; every multicellular entity would be descended from some version of chrysophytes or diatoms or "golden-brown algae"; and maybe some malacoid (mollusc-like) organisms would dominate. Here, octopada seem to be pretty intelligent; so intelligent molluscs are possible, but you'd want them to have their shells on the outside, not have cuttlebones like cuttlefish have.

[Xonen]

Ok, so what kind of biochemistry might allow for a multicellular organism to survive extreme temperatures of at least 2000 degrees centigrade?

We're talking about this, right? So basically, it would suffice for these beings to be able to survive brief exposures to such temperatures, while their normal living environment would be a couple of thousand Kelvin cooler? I guess in that case, the heat-shielding exoskeleton would really be the most realistic option. I doubt any complex chemicals would remain stable over such a huge temperature range, so basically, their actual body temperature can't vary that much without everything in their cells going haywire. Hell, increase the core body temperature of a human just by a few degrees and we drop dead; that's how fine-tuned these systems tend to be.

[Ahzoh]

Ok, so what kind of biochemistry might allow for a multicellular organism to survive extreme temperatures of at least 2000 degrees centigrade?

We're talking about this, right? So basically, it would suffice for these beings to be able to survive brief exposures to such temperatures, while their normal living environment would be a couple of thousand Kelvin cooler? I guess in that case, the heat-shielding exoskeleton would really be the most realistic option. I doubt any complex chemicals would remain stable over such a huge temperature range, so basically, their actual body temperature can't vary that much without everything in their cells going haywire. Hell, increase the core body temperature of a human just by a few degrees and we drop dead; that's how fine-tuned these systems tend to be.

Yes, we talk about the Khsinesir.
Yes they can live in the desert, but you'll just as likely find them in volcanoes, perhaps swimming in it, apparently lava is about 700-1400 degrees centigrade. they are able to hold molten metals with their hands.

My idea behind these properties comes from the Tzhaar, golem-like beings made of obsidian: http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/TzHaar
Hell, even the way Khsinesir die, and currency are inspired by this race.

They don't really have an exo-skeleton...

I guess I'm going to have to chalk this one up to magic...