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Zerraspace — Chiron - Altitude Map (Preliminary)
Published: 2013-02-02 16:00:03 +0000 UTC; Views: 425; Favourites: 2; Downloads: 14
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Description
This image is for neither Zainter nor Meios, though the planet is does share a place in the Zainter story universe. As before, this altitude map is here to help determine the planet's climate, at which point I may be able to assign more story significance to it.Related content
Comments: 13
It's still a work in progress; I'll be sure to let you know where this leads.
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It's not as good as my last one [link] , but I thank you for the praise nonetheless. This is partly an experiment in climate models, but should this concept prove habitable to human beings, it might gain more attention in the future.
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it has much less water, but that would allow for some very unique flora and fauna. 
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Well, you wouldn't know from the map, but it orbits fairly close to its sun, has a fairly thin atmosphere and a very fast rotation rate. I intend to see how these three factors (each carrying a vast range of implications) will combine.
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i'm sure it'll be possible to ballance these factors out. but if it is close to a star and still has water, your star should be a red dwarf or an orange dwarf at least. rotation rate you mean length of the year or length of the day? if it's gonna have short day (shorter than 16 hours) I'm afraid it'll still be a young planet without much of complex life, if it's gonna have short year, life can adapt to that for sure.
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Close is a relative term; it's simply closer than one would expect an Earth-like planet to be around this type of star (which is actually larger than the sun). This is counteracted partially by the thin atmosphere (which doesn't hold onto the heat) and high albedo, meaning it reflects much of the radiation that falls on it (Venus has such a high albedo it would actually be colder than Earth if not for the powerful greenhouse). Ocean water has low albedo, so taking away much of that should help. This actually contributes to the short day; it has no moon to slow down its rotation period, meaning any reduction in day length is due to tidal influence from the star (which is a minor influence at best).
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ehhh... well, there are probably going to be problems. large stars are short-lived, so by the time when complex life would get established on dry land, the star would go supernova. (that depends on how much bigger the star is going to be in comparison with sun, but even a small mass diference affects luminosity a lot. for example a star with 0.9 mass of the sun has only 60% stellar luminosity - if the sun was 10% less massive, Venus would be the sweetspot. The MGHZ (maximum greenhouse habitable zone) of larger stars is farther away, so a relatively closely orbiting planet is not a good spot. Thin atmosphere would let a lot of radiation through, and people would probably have to wear spacesuits even on the surface in order to breathe and to protect their skin.
On the contrary, if your planet had a thick atmosphere with low water vapour, CO2 and methane content, (to prevent the greenhouse) it would probably be friendlier. local plants would have to be "hitech" in comparison with earth to make do with low CO2 percentage, but they could produce more O2, which would in turn create a thick O3 layer. the atmosphere would keep the radiation out and people could breathe there. but I'd be careful not to make the atmosphere too thick, if it were more than 2 times thicker than earth's atmosphere, even slow winds would be destructive and people could have health problems from the pressure.
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I'm aware of that, and feel that I must explain myself; the star is only 10% larger than the sun, with lifetime of roughly 8 billion years, more than long enough for complex life to arise and flourish, which results in much higher luminosity (1.519 times that of our sun). I wouldn't have it orbiting a star with lifetime under 3 billion years (that's equivalent to a mass of about 1.6186 suns), though I'd probably be safer with 4 billion (that's 1.4427 solar masses).
I was concerned about the CO2 levels and so checked up studies regarding just such a situation; it turns out C3 photosynthesis is possible with CO2 levels as low as 50 ppm (that's around one-eighth to one-sixth what we have on Earth), and C4 photosynthesis can run with as little as 10 ppm (not that I'm stooping down to either level). Current composition would be equivalent to 124 ppm in Earth's atmosphere, not much but high above either limit. It's ironic that you bring up high oxygen levels yielding high ozone; I had already considered high oxygen levels for this planet.
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well that sounds reasonable, I was just mentioning oxygen because a thin atmosphere would have a weak ozone layer
Also, is the planet larger or smaller than earth? and is there any closer estimate regarding the distance from the star? According to stargen, a 1.1 solar mass star would have its MGHZ ragning from 1.025 to 1.819 AU, so somewhere in this range should be fine.
And a star with a 4 billion year lifespan would have already gone supernova if it were in the center of our system, amphibians would barely leave the water, and lobe-finned fish would have seen a big honking fireworks
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Let's just say I can't tweak the factors of this star 
The planet is significantly larger than Earth (1.84 Earth radii and 4.135 Earth masses), but its Mars-like density allows it to have gravity not much higher than what we're familiar with (1.22 g's).
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