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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5344316" data-attributes="member: 177">I am assuming the usual mechanics occur, which will tend to drive the moon onto that plane, even if it doesn't start there."Short cosmological" is more on the hundred million year range or less than the billion year range.  An object like Pluto (small, very far from the star) might take 10 billion years or more to come to be tidally locked.   An object like Mercury (small, close to the star) has reached it's steady spin-orbit resonance (locking is just a very simple such resonance) in well under 4 billion years.  An object like our moon (large on the scale of the two bodies in question) got tidally locked early on as well.Can you place a game in a time during the process of locking?  Sure.  That can be cool because it would be... geologically interesting (earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and so on).  But the math would suggest that the locking would occur early in the arrangement, rather than later.Yes.  That "low/high" pattern is only the general flow that's required. You can get to that with convection bands.In general, the system will be driven to the closest state of strong resonance.  But the relative sizes, speeds, compositions and distances between the object matter a great deal.   The moon would transit the sun frequently.  Whether that counts as an "eclipse" depends on relative sized and distances.  Our setup is peculiar, as our moon's just at the size and distance to just barely cover the sun's disk in the sky.  But that is a coincidence, not a thing that generally happens.I'll see if I can find the data to tell you.  I suspect it'd be much larger than our sun is in our sky.Edit:  Quick back-of-envelope calculation, given what data I can find on Gliese 581 and 581g : Our sun has an apparent diameter of about 0.5 degrees when seen from Earth.  I think Gliese 581 would have an apparent diameter of about one degree, as seen from G.  So, something like 4 times the total area - big, but not super-jigundo.</blockquote>

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