Tidally locked atmospheric planet.

[Capt Snuggler]

I was reading this article about "eyeball worlds".

Its basically a planet with atmosphere and weather that is tidally locked so one side is always facing the star so is a baking hot desert, while the other is always in a frozen wintery night. with a temperate ring around the middle:

So I thought if KSP is going to get one more planet before v1.0 it would be cool if it was one like this.

*Question to all the astro-minded people:

by being tidally locked, would that also mean the core would be solid with a weak magnetosphere? and if so, would that also mean the atmosphere would be blasted away by solar wind too?

[Bill Phil]

The core being solid would depend on the amount of radioactive elements within it, and the temperature at the time of the first and second measurements.

The core would be slower, so the magnetic field is weaker... But maybe it can deflect the solar wind to the poles (smaller Auroras than on Earth, though...).

If the atmosphere is constantly being refilled, then it could last.

[Majorjim!]

I was reading this article about "eyeball worlds".

Its basically a planet with atmosphere and weather that is tidally locked so one side is always facing the star so is a baking hot desert, while the other is always in a frozen wintery night. with a temperate ring around the middle:

http://media.gizmodo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/rapruziotvzkzl8wszqm-620x349.jpg

So I thought if KSP is going to get one more planet before v1.0 it would be cool if it was one like this.

*Question to all the astro-minded people:

by being tidally locked, would that also mean the core would be solid with a weak magnetosphere? and if so, would that also mean the atmosphere would be blasted away by solar wind too?

To the planet factory!!

[Renegrade]

That..would be pretty cool.

I don't think we're getting any new planets though for 1.0 :C

[Torquemadus]

You would normally expect to find a tidally locked planet like this orbiting very close to a red dwarf star.

Red dwarves are much more common than Sun-like yellow stars. Unfortunately, they don't put out much heat and light. Any planet orbiting close enough to be habitable would also likely become tidally locked (unless it was itself orbiting a bigger planet, such as a gas giant).

A habitable tidally locked world would need to be close enough to it's parent star to make the daylight side inhospitably hot. If the daylight side were temperate, the night side would be so cold as to become a trap that would freeze out the planet's atmosphere. In either case, space based sunshades and mirrors could be used to improve the habitability of such a planet.

[helaeon]

And if none of the above things turned out to be so, it sat at some perfect goldilocks zone that you didn't freeze out the atmosphere or burn it off, and the planet had a dynamo that was still spinning somehow or generating a magnetic field another way so the stability of the atmosphere staying in place wasn't an issue.

The winds on that planet would be utterly terrifying and you'd want no part of it. Not to say some life couldn't evolve in such a place, but it would be very different from us.

[moronwrocket]

Red dwarfs are also notorious for massive solar flares, so unless the planet has a strong magnetosphere and/or dense atmosphere, life would be pretty rough on the sun-facing side. With enough greenhouse gas like CO2, it's possible the night side will not be a frozen wasteland - case in point, Venus is a pretty darn slow rotator, yet its night side and day side are essentially the same temp at the surface. With no rotation, there isn't any Coriolis force driving jet streams or hurricanes.

[Astrofox]

We already have Laythe, but that is a moon, so I feel as if instead of a "habitable" world we instead have an analog that looks like that of Kepler-10b, with 100% more lakes of lava of course.

[RogueMason]

I think such a world would be really cool, but I feel it would best be reserved for another star system, should they ever appear in the base game.

It reminds me of some planet ideas that I saw around here quite a while ago, now. Here be the thread. You might notice some similarities in the styles.

[randomness5555]

One Planet factory mod (could not tell you which, slightly forgot) did have a planet like that. Have a look around, you might find it.