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We're getting young star system in form of Debdeb. What about old star systems?


The Aziz

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I may or may not be currently reading a book about formation of the earliest stars (First Light by Emma Chapman, I recommend it very much), and it occured to me. Why couldn't there be a system after +12 billion years of evolution? Made of II population star, so, most likely a red dwarf, or something below 0.5 Kerbol masses, which means it's very low metallicity, same would probably apply to planets. After such long time of evolution, it should be quite interesting to explore. Who knows, maybe the system is after close contact with another star, so orbits are distorted, highly elliptic, crossing each other etc. Less heavy elements means no heavy iron cores so gas giants are out of question, surfaces scarred after collisions with different objects, probably even interplanetary guests (like Omuamua), possibly a planet that hosted an atmosphere and some liquid on the surface, but evolved to the point when there's no sign of either.

And all of it it's still there because the lifetime of a star is so long it hasn't changed since it's creation.

Side note, planets around III population stars are impossible, they physically wouldn't be able to form, so don't even mention it.

Edited by The Aziz
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1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

I may or may not be currently reading a book about formation of the earliest stars (First Light by Emma Chapman, I recommend it very much), and it occured to me. Why couldn't there be a system after +12 billion years of evolution? Made of II population star, so, most likely a red dwarf, or something below 0.5 Kerbol masses, which means it's very low metallicity, same would probably apply to planets. After such long time of evolution, it should be quite interesting to explore. Who knows, maybe the system is after close contact with another star, so orbits are distorted, highly elliptic, crossing each other etc. Less heavy elements means no heavy iron cores so gas giants are out of question, surfaces scarred after collisions with different objects, probably even interplanetary guests (like Omuamua), possibly a planet that hosted an atmosphere and some liquid on the surface, but evolved to the point when there's no sign of either.

And all of it it's still there because the lifetime of a star is so long it hasn't changed since it's creation.

Side note, planets around III population stars are impossible, they physically wouldn't be able to form, so don't even mention it.

I also expect a wide variety of systems.

I absolutely love your description of a possible system! It sounds like a real challenge to navigate and explore. It's got some very unique vibes to it.

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A Trappist-1 analog system would be nice. An old, small red dwarf star with 7 terrestrial planets, the farthest away has an orbital period of less than 19days (450 hours). Astrum has a nice video on it, if you're interested. The fun bit is that the Trappist-1 system makes the Kerbol system looks humongous in comparison. All the planets would fit between Kerbol and Kerbin easily, with the most exterior (Trappist-1h) being only 9ish million km away from the star, while Kerbin sits at around 13 million km. The funnier bit is that the Trappist-1 system could very well harbor one (or more!) habitable world. An interesting destination for any inspired kerbonaut.

That said, orbit stability doesn't just collapse, and any major upheaval is only transitory, and very localized. Having a few bodies with eccentric orbits is understandable, but the more massive they are the shorter those orbit will remain. The odds of finding a system at exactly the right moment is pretty low. The more extreme the composition, the lower the probabilities get.

P.S. Gas giants are still planets, so third-population stars could have had planets. 

Edited by Axelord FTW
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2 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

P.S. Gas giants are still planets, so third-population stars could have had planets

You sure a planet purely made of hydrogen and helium would be able to form? The outer layers, perhaps. What about the core? There's not even oxygen out there for the icy core.

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2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

You sure a planet purely made of hydrogen and helium would be able to form? The outer layers, perhaps. What about the core? There's not even oxygen out there for the icy core.

The process behind accretion is the same whether a core is solid or not. Some gravitational collapses would happen without enough mass to ignite, there's no inherent lower limit.

Edited by Axelord FTW
typo
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1 hour ago, Axelord FTW said:

The process behind accretion is the same whether a core is solid or not. Some gravitational collapses would happen without enough mass to ignite, there's no inherent limit lower limit.

Without enough pressure to counterbalance gravity, the gas would simply dissipate, and no object would be formed. Besides, models suggest that early stars were very hungry, they'd either consume anything in their neighborhood or fling it away. So chances for any smaller object to be formed are tiny. Especially since III gen stars were big and had short lives.

Could be switch back to something that's proven to exist?

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Tiny is not naught.

There's no reason why there wouldn't be a gravity collapse without enough mass to initiate fusion. The line between gas giants and brown dwarf stars is blurry, too. Some stellar encounters and fly-by loveery probably resulted in some really weird arrangements somewhere, at some point. Pop-III stars themselves were too short lived to allow much to happen to the remaining hydrogen halo, but captures and ejections probably happened a lot, even at those short cosmological timescales.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Edited by Axelord FTW
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Expanding off what @Axelord FTW said, since the line between gas giants and brown dwarfs is blurry, you could have a brown dwarf that's on the edge of being a gas giant (only being a brown dwarf by the core sustaining D-T fusion and not the triple-alpha process seen in all true stars) eventually find its way into the orbit of a white dwarf, where that white dwarf is undergoing periodic novas because of the siphoning of hydrogen off of the brown dwarf.

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  • 1 month later...

I strongly suspect that whatever star system Puf belongs to will be be a TRAPPIST-1 style red dwarf system. Apparently, it's possible that TRAPPIST-1d is an eyeball planet irl, just like Puf.

Can't wait to see those sci-fi vistas where other planets look bigger in the sky than the full moon looks from earth!

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