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Designing a Galaxy


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For the past month or so, I've undertaken a huge project for myself. I'm designing my own galaxy with individual stars and planets for an upcoming book I'm thinking about writing. I've created a bunch of different star systems with unique planets, moons, and even asteroids. Since I've been creating them for a while, I've been running out of new and unique ideas for planets. That's where you come in!

I need your help coming up with ideas. I would really appreciate it if you would think of some unique planets with me. I need you to include if the planet is rocky or a gas planet, if it has moons or not (tell me how many and what the biggest diameter of one is), the diameter of the planet (in miles or kilometers, it doesn't matter :)), if it has an atmosphere (if it does, how high is the atmosphere), its amount of gravity (i.e.- like it does in KSP), what color the planet is, and what its surface mostly consists of. Also, feel free to share a unique name for your planet! I'll come up with the rest like the surface temperature and its orbit around its star.

Post your ideas below and I'll respond with a full description and all the data for the planet as soon as I can. I might just use your idea for my book! 

If you have any questions feel free to ask them. 

Edit: I'm not going to be creating an ENTIRE galaxy with the hundreds of billions of stars it may have. I may create as much as 200 planets and choose the most unique or strange ones (maybe up to 10 or 15 planets I may have mentioned or landed on.) So far I've created about 100 unique worlds and I just need help thinking of more.  

Edited by The Raging Sandwich
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2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

I think it would be a good idea for you to show is what you already created. That way we can avoid doing something too similar.

Ok, that's reasonable. I'll give you a couple samples of stuff I've already done. Keep in mind that I don't really mind if stuff is a little similar. I have a lot of similar planets I've made.

Tycho 12a                                     Tycho 12c                                                           Tycho 1282b                                            Tycho 1282c                                      CO 123572b

Rocky                                            Gaseous                                                             Rocky                                                       Rocky                                                Rocky

Moons- no                                     Moons- yes; 12; largest diameter- 862 mi          Moons- no                                                Moons- no                                        Moons- yes; 1; diameter- 1,300 mi                                

Diameter- 2,800 mi                       Diameter- 22,500 mi                                           Diameter- 2900 mi                                    Diameter- 1200 mi                            Diameter- 2500 mi

Atmosphere- no                            Atmosphere- yes; 148 mi                                    Atmosphere- no                                        Atmosphere- yes; 34 mi                    Atmosphere- yes; 43 mi

Gravity- 0.28 g                              Gravity- 8.2 g                                                      Gravity- 1.7 g                                            Gravity- 1 g                                       Gravity- 0.79 g

Color- yellowish                             Color- greenish-brown                                        Color- silvery-white                                   Color- silver                                       Color- orangy-blue                       

Surface temp- 450 F                      Surface temp- 42 F                                            Surface temp- 954 F                                 Surface temp- 312 F                         Surface temp- 71 F

Surface Majority- sulfur                  Surface majority- helium                                    Surface majority- crystalized iridium          Surface majority- liquid gallium         Surface majority- fresh water

Solar orbit- 67.92 million mi            Solar orbit- 523.12 million mi                             Solar orbit- 94.23 million mi                       Solar orbit- 282.54 million mi            Solar orbit- 31.98 million mi

 

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That's a small galaxy. Our own galaxy is thought to contain over 100 billion stars.

You should start off with your book and invent whatever you need as the need arises. A galaxy is big enough for anything to exist.

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My advice is to think of the bizarre. What is the most bizarre star system you can think of that can actually exist? Just to list a few examples, the star systems AR Cassiopeiae and Nu Scorpii have likely—though not completely confirmed—7 stars in them, the shortest orbital period of any exoplanet is about 6 hours, there have been confirmed a ring system on a planet 200x larger than Saturn's rings, the newly discovered exoplanet HD 131399Ab is in a triple star system, and for a portion of its orbit, 2 suns set the same time as 1 sun rises.

So yes, weird scenarios like this can really capture a reader's attention. I've provided a few links for you. Hopefully you can acquire a few ideas to incorporate in your writing from them:

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You will never get to actually write your book if you'll try to create entire galaxy for the background first. How many stars and planetary systems you want to actually feature in the plot? As in - the protagonists are going to visit them or even casually mention their names in a conversation? Five? Ten? If more, potential readers will start yawning halfway through the list. We already have star catalogs for people who like that kind of reading.

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26 minutes ago, Scotius said:

You will never get to actually write your book if you'll try to create entire galaxy for the background first. How many stars and planetary systems you want to actually feature in the plot? As in - the protagonists are going to visit them or even casually mention their names in a conversation? Five? Ten? If more, potential readers will start yawning halfway through the list. We already have star catalogs for people who like that kind of reading.

Aye. Maybe you've got the next Star Wars cooking in your head, but don't get ahead of yourself. Worry about key systems, strategic points, places that are most relevant. Just like a video game, use "level of detail." Only the places you actually visit need the highest level.

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11 hours ago, vger said:

Aye. Maybe you've got the next Star Wars cooking in your head, but don't get ahead of yourself. Worry about key systems, strategic points, places that are most relevant. Just like a video game, use "level of detail." Only the places you actually visit need the highest level.

That's exactly what I'm doing! :D

14 hours ago, SyzygyΣE said:

My advice is to think of the bizarre. What is the most bizarre star system you can think of that can actually exist? Just to list a few examples, the star systems AR Cassiopeiae and Nu Scorpii have likely—though not completely confirmed—7 stars in them, the shortest orbital period of any exoplanet is about 6 hours, there have been confirmed a ring system on a planet 200x larger than Saturn's rings, the newly discovered exoplanet HD 131399Ab is in a triple star system, and for a portion of its orbit, 2 suns set the same time as 1 sun rises.

So yes, weird scenarios like this can really capture a reader's attention. I've provided a few links for you. Hopefully you can acquire a few ideas to incorporate in your writing from them:

I've already come up with a few strange planets like one that has sand dunes made of asbestos or a large orange one that is too big to even be considered an actual planet. (I got the idea from mixing Jool and Hat-P-32)

Edited by The Raging Sandwich
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1 hour ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

I've already come up with a few strange planets like one that has sand dunes made of asbestos or a large orange one that is too big to even be considered an actual planet. (I got the idea from mixing Jool and Hat-P-32)

Hmm. If this is a highly sci-fi piece of work then the possibilities are endless. I mean, there's exoplanets we probably don't know can even exist, but only after finding them can we accept these facts. Heck, a decade or so ago we didn't even know we could find exoplanets light years away, and look at us now. :D

Have you tried the following possibilities?

  • Exoplanets around:
    • Neutron stars, pulsars, supernovas, or by extension, magnetars. I can't even begin to comprehend how anything is going to survive near a magnetar because its magnetic field is, what, 1000 trillion times stronger than Earths?
    • Extremely bright stars, stars like R136a1.
    • Extremely large stars, stars like UY Scuti.
  • Rogue exoplanets. There are actually quite a few of these objects that have been ejected from their former star systems and are travelling through interstellar space. Would be quite troublesome if a wandering gas giant decides to pay a visit through another star system. It could wreck havoc because of its gravity.
  • Planets with unusual albedos—very dark or very light.
  • Moons of moons.
  • Objects currently undergoing Roche limit fragmentation.
  • Very distant exoplanets around their stars or rogue planets that are abnormally hot because of tidal heating from a large moon/companion.
  • Speaking of tidal forces, try a world with water or another liquid and a large moon. It would have tsunami tides.
  • An Oort Cloud around another star.
  • And lastly, play around with the eccentricity of orbits. I like the concept of a planet where, for a portion of its orbit, it would be habitable. There's a few directions you can go if you decide to choose that.
Edited by SyzygyΣE
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12 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Isn't it more like 200 to 400 billion stars (est) in Milky Way?

On 10 July 2016 at 4:51 AM, The Raging Sandwich said:

Edit: I'm not going to be creating an ENTIRE galaxy with the hundreds of billions of stars it may have.

The Milky Way does indeed contain around that number of stars and it is true we can't calculate the exact number, but he has already said this before. Hundreds of billions includes 200–400 billion. :wink:

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Ah right. Someone up above said "100 billion" and my understanding was, the best estimates were "at least 200 billion, but possibly as many as 400 billion." My understanding is, they do not know for certain, and it may not be possible to know for certain without  faster than light travel and/or a more firm understanding of what dark matter is.

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14 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Ah right. Someone up above said "100 billion" and my understanding was, the best estimates were "at least 200 billion, but possibly as many as 400 billion." My understanding is, they do not know for certain, and it may not be possible to know for certain without  faster than light travel and/or a more firm understanding of what dark matter is.

Yeah, different sources quote different things. Wikipedia says 200–400 billion, Universe Today says up to 400 billion and specifies no lower limit, Space.com says 100 billion–400 billion, and NASA also says 100 billion–400 billion. The truth is that these estimates are the best we have to work with. Perhaps there is some way to more accurately calculate the number of stars in a galaxy other than having 100 000 supercomputers counting various pinpoints of light—though that does sound like a very Kerbalish thing to do—we simply just don't have the technology or knowledge to do it yet. :lol:

Honestly I feel kind of depressed being born in this particular century. Too late to explore the world, too early to explore the stars. But, I guess I can't be much more satisfied than gazing up and wondering what lies out there, feeling as if the cosmos is something hereditary for mankind to reach.

Edited by SyzygyΣE
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This is a bit "pop" ized, but I really enjoyed it. For me as a mostly biological scientist, it seemed to do a pretty good job "weaving" it all together: the Milky Way, star life cycles, the great mysteries of dark matter, the evolution of the universe, etc.

Maybe some of you guys will enjoy it, if you haven't already seen it.

 

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3 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

Ah right. Someone up above said "100 billion" and my understanding was, the best estimates were "at least 200 billion, but possibly as many as 400 billion." My understanding is, they do not know for certain, and it may not be possible to know for certain without  faster than light travel and/or a more firm understanding of what dark matter is.

The beginning of the documentary said about 200 billion stars, but there really is no real possible way in the near future to find out something like this! Just think how many stars there are in the entire known universe!

4 hours ago, SyzygyΣE said:

Hmm. If this is a highly sci-fi piece of work then the possibilities are endless. I mean, there's exoplanets we probably don't know can even exist, but only after finding them can we accept these facts. Heck, a decade or so ago we didn't even know we could find exoplanets light years away, and look at us now. :D

Have you tried the following possibilities?

  • Exoplanets around:
    • Neutron stars, pulsars, supernovas, or by extension, magnetars. I can't even begin to comprehend how anything is going to survive near a magnetar because its magnetic field is, what, 1000 trillion times stronger than Earths?
    • Extremely bright stars, stars like R136a1.
    • Extremely large stars, stars like UY Scuti.
  • Rogue exoplanets. There are actually quite a few of these objects that have been ejected from their former star systems and are travelling through interstellar space. Would be quite troublesome if a wandering gas giant decides to pay a visit through another star system. It could wreck havoc because of its gravity.
  • Planets with unusual albedos—very dark or very light.
  • Moons of moons.
  • Objects currently undergoing Roche limit fragmentation.
  • Very distant exoplanets around their stars or rogue planets that are abnormally hot because of tidal heating from a large moon/companion.
  • Speaking of tidal forces, try a world with water or another liquid and a large moon. It would have tsunami tides.
  • An Oort Cloud around another star.
  • And lastly, play around with the eccentricity of orbits. I like the concept of a planet where, for a portion of its orbit, it would be habitable. There's a few directions you can go if you decide to choose that.

I've already (that I can remember) have made planets around neutron stars and Wolfe Rayet stars. In fact, I've mixed a rouge planet with a Wolfe Rayet, where the planet is currently being captured by the star in a VERY eccentric orbit. I've also created stars with asteroid belts containing large asteroid-like dwarf planets sort of like Vesta and Ceres. I've created planets with mostly water on the surface (take the CO 123572b example up above; I think I might make it the traveler's destination in the book), I've also created a planet with a unique eccentricity where at a certain point in the orbit that crystal structures on the surface melt and then freeze again when it gets farther away. Just to name a few! 

I've gotten into painting recently and I've been working on some concept art for CO 123572b (the fresh water planet I stated about above) the last two days. Once I'm done with it I'll try to post a picture of it on here!

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17 minutes ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

The beginning of the documentary said about 200 billion stars, but there really is no real possible way in the near future to find out something like this! Just think how many stars there are in the entire known universe!

At least 100 billion galaxies, updated recently to an estimate of 225 billion but advances in telescopes may result in that estimate going up.

Quote

these estimates represent the number of galaxies we can detect, given the power of our current telescopes, our observing time, and the wavelength of light we are observing. If we had larger telescopes and more observing time, we would be able to detect even fainter galaxies. Because of the finite age of the universe, even with the most powerful telescopes we could ever create, we would eventually run out of galaxies to count in the observable universe.

Milky Way is, if memory serves, a fairly "average" sized (if not smallish) galaxy. Andromeda contains a trillion stars they guesstimate.

Quote

Being approximately 220,000 light years across, it is the largest galaxy of the

Local Group, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 other smaller galaxies. Despite earlier findings that suggested that the Milky Way contains more dark matter and could be the largest in the grouping,[12] the 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion (1012) stars:[9] at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.[13]

so 3 x 10^11 (300 billion in an 'average' galaxy) x 2.25 x 10^11 = 6.75 x 10^22 eh?

Hmmm, not too bad . . . my math skills have not totally atrophied! How many stars in the observable universe"

Quote

ay is home to around 300 billion stars, but it’s not representative of galaxies in general. The Milky Way is a titan compared to abundant but faint dwarf galaxies, and it in turn is dwarfed by rare giant elliptical galaxies, which can be 20 times more massive. By measuring the number and luminosity of observable galaxies, astronomers put current estimates of the total stellar population at roughly 70 billion trillion (7 x 10

22).

I guess the Milky Way is actually "below average" in stellar count.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited by Diche Bach
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6 minutes ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Okay, that's making my head hurt! 

Oh it hasn't even got going yet . . .

Quote

The average adult human body has around 37.2 trillion cells.

A single cell  . . .

Quote

So the number of molecules in a typical human cell is somewhere between 5 million and 2 trillion, probably closer to the higher end of this range as human cells are roughly half water (85% of the human body is water, 60% of this is inside cells). One molecule made up from many atoms.

So, if we consider the number of molecules just on Earth it is almost beyond comprehension.

Still not as complex as "Chess" though ! :D

 

Quote

 

Edited by Diche Bach
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4 hours ago, SyzygyΣE said:

Rogue exoplanets. There are actually quite a few of these objects that have been ejected from their former star systems and are travelling through interstellar space. Would be quite troublesome if a wandering gas giant decides to pay a visit through another star system. It could wreck havoc because of its gravity.

Here's my rogue planet I just thought of:

RP 1222

Gaseous

Moons- yes; 2; largest diameter- 34 mi

Diameter- 56,720 mi

Atmosphere- yes; 184 mi

Gravity- 11.348 g

Color- dark gray

Surface temp- N/A

Surface majority- hydrogen

Solar orbit- N/A

 

4 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Oh it hasn't even got going yet . . .

A single cell  . . .

So, if we consider the number of molecules just on Earth it is almost beyond comprehension.

Still not as complex as "Chess" though ! :D

 

 

Stop, you're going to give me a headache! I normally think about random stuff like this, but not at this scale! :rolleyes:

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4 hours ago, SyzygyΣE said:

Planets with unusual albedos—very dark or very light. 

Here's one for that:

CO 232812a

Rocky

Moons- yes; 1; diameter- 16 miles

Diameter- 780 mi

Atmosphere- yes; 37 mi

Gravity- 0.31 g

Color- very dark red

Surface temp- 335 F

Surface majority- iron

Solar orbit- 12.67 million mi

 

This small planet would orbit a red dwarf star at a very close distance. It would have thick, black clouds covering most of the planet which would give it a very dark albedo. The clouds would also trap the heat of the star like Venus.

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5 hours ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

I've already (that I can remember) have made planets around neutron stars and Wolfe Rayet stars. In fact, I've mixed a rouge planet with a Wolfe Rayet, where the planet is currently being captured by the star in a VERY eccentric orbit. I've also created stars with asteroid belts containing large asteroid-like dwarf planets sort of like Vesta and Ceres. I've created planets with mostly water on the surface (take the CO 123572b example up above; I think I might make it the traveler's destination in the book), I've also created a planet with a unique eccentricity where at a certain point in the orbit that crystal structures on the surface melt and then freeze again when it gets farther away. Just to name a few! 

I've gotten into painting recently and I've been working on some concept art for CO 123572b (the fresh water planet I stated about above) the last two days. Once I'm done with it I'll try to post a picture of it on here!

Man, you really have put a lot of effort thinking about this, haven't you? Well, in that case I'll try and suggest a few things not about the location of the exoplanets, but about the exoplanets themselves.

First of all, weather. There's a lot of weather and dynamics even in our solar system we don't completely understand yet. Who knows what strange things you can implement here? If, say, CO 123572b has rather warm oceans and one day isn't too long, it would spawn monstrous storms and hurricanes. If the entire surface is water and there is little land, it becomes even more interesting because, without landfall, hurricanes will usually last a very, very long time, provided they don't wander into cold waters or into an area with high wind shear. On the other hand, planets with atmospheres rich in oxygen are quite interesting too. Earth once actually went through this phase where oxygen levels were higher than today. With that amount of oxygen, lightning strikes would create immense fires because fires require oxygen to ignite and there's so much of it around in the air.

By extension, the top wind speed record we know of is over Mach 7, 20x faster than the highest we've recoded on Earth. That is on the planet HD 189733b. There's a lot you can do with wind, too.

And second, the lithosphere. Moons like Io are incredibly volcanically active, and while a planet like Venus may seem pretty dead, there is a theory that, because Venus has no plate tectonics, magma left from its early days is just building and building underneath its surface and one day, it would result in a cataclysmic global eruption event, kind of like a super-volcano erupting here on Earth, except quite literally everywhere on Venus. 500 million years ago we believe this kind of event happened once. Maybe you can somehow incorporate this into an exoplanet or two.

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13 minutes ago, SyzygyΣE said:

Man, you really have put a lot of effort thinking about this, haven't you? Well, in that case I'll try and suggest a few things not about the location of the exoplanets, but about the exoplanets themselves.

First of all, weather. There's a lot of weather and dynamics even in our solar system we don't completely understand yet. Who knows what strange things you can implement here? If, say, CO 123572b has rather warm oceans and one day isn't too long, it would spawn monstrous storms and hurricanes. If the entire surface is water and there is little land, it becomes even more interesting because, without landfall, hurricanes will usually last a very, very long time, provided they don't wander into cold waters or into an area with high wind shear. On the other hand, planets with atmospheres rich in oxygen are quite interesting too. Earth once actually went through this phase where oxygen levels were higher than today. With that amount of oxygen, lightning strikes would create immense fires because fires require oxygen to ignite and there's so much of it around in the air.

By extension, the top wind speed record we know of is over Mach 7, 20x faster than the highest we've recoded on Earth. That is on the planet HD 189733b. There's a lot you can do with wind, too.

And second, the lithosphere. Moons like Io are incredibly volcanically active, and while a planet like Venus may seem pretty dead, there is a theory that, because Venus has no plate tectonics, magma left from its early days is just building and building underneath its surface and one day, it would result in a cataclysmic global eruption event, kind of like a super-volcano erupting here on Earth, except quite literally everywhere on Venus. 500 million years ago we believe this kind of event happened once. Maybe you can somehow incorporate this into an exoplanet or two.

I like these ideas! I might incorporate a couple of those in my book. I was thinking that only about 21% or so of CO 123572b would be actual land, too. I was also thinking of making it the characters' destination because of all the fresh water on it, so I probably won't incorporate the deadly lightning, although some points on the planet could have a more dense atmosphere like at volcanoes or something. Because it orbits a red dwarf star, and is the most distant planet in its solar system (31.98 million miles away from the star) it would be a lot more dim than Earth and there would probably be a different colored sky, maybe an orangy-blue color. Because of its low gravity (0.79 g), it probably would have a less dense atmosphere which means that lightning (if it has any) would be less destructive than on Earth. I do like the hurricane idea and the high winds, too. Maybe in the book they would be trying to land in a spot but a deadly hurricane would be right where they were so they would have to avoid it and land somewhere else. 

I like the volcanic moon idea, too. Maybe if they land at an inhabited planet that humans had set an outpost at, they could land there and refuel. But the moon of that potential planet would be like Venus where there is no tectonic activity but magma from the moon's core could build up and cause a major threat to the crew. Anyways, its just a thought! 

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11 minutes ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

I do like the hurricane idea and the high winds, too. Maybe in the book they would be trying to land in a spot but a deadly hurricane would be right where they were so they would have to avoid it and land somewhere else. 

Do keep in mind though, the atmospheric pressure influences the "punch" wind packs. For example, gale force winds on Mars are actually relatively common, but because the atmosphere is so thin, it doesn't "pack" much force behind it. If you were an astronaut on Mars, it would feel more like a gentle breeze. On the other hand, because Venus has an atmosphere 90 times denser than Earth's, all that air is "packed" into a tighter space, so any breeze on the surface would actually feel more like a gust or running into a brick wall.

Getting through the lower atmosphere of Venus is more like dropping a coin through oil. In fact, early Soviet Venera probes actually ran out of battery before reaching the surface because the parachutes slowed their descent tremendously. Later probes actually had no parachutes and instead had a shock proof shield around them because the density of the atmosphere was what slowed them down sufficiently. So it's just about adjusting the parameters and coming up with one that is the most logical.

Edited by SyzygyΣE
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