Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 2342372" data-attributes="member: 3649">As was said above, mass not size affects gravity. A planet the same size as Earth but with less gravity has lesser mass. There will be fewer metals. or the metallic core will be smaller. A planet smaller than Earth but with a much greater abundance of metals would have a higher gravity (and probably be very unaccomodating to humans because of all the heavy metals in the biosphere).By 'other places' I assume you mean other planets; gravity does not vary significantly across a planet surface. There is no planet where the gravity is so low you'd be thrown into space by your actions; such a planet would have no atmosphere because there isn't enough gravity to hold it there. Also, it wouldn't be a planet-sized body; more like an asteroid. I would think it would be very unlikely that any planetary force could create rings; enough dust and ash would have to be expelled to reach escape velocity (about 25,000 miles an hour for Earth; it will be more for your theoretical higher gravity planet), and those particles would still have to make it up through the atmosphere. Also, the volcano would have to expel several gigatons of matter, all of it making it into space, to form visible rings. Something like the mass of the Moon. Tremendous volcanos and such do cause very tiny fluctuations in our orbit but nothing that matters, and have nothing to do with the axial tilt. As was said before, the Earth was much more geologically active in the past and that didn't change our orbit all that much.Now, having said that, what you might want to look into for your fictional world is the wonderful world of pseudoscience! There is a notion called a Great Pole Shift that posits that the planet crust can slip on the magma it floats on and shift around. Thus, tropical continents could suddenly find themselves in the arctic, etc.</blockquote>

Verification