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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Loren Pechtel" data-source="post: 5856907" data-attributes="member: 4679">If it's cool enough not to emit any visible light it's also too cool to raise the planet to habitable temperatures.Furthermore, the cooler the central body the closer the orbit has to be to get enough warmth.  Energy goes at the square of distance but tides go at the cube of distance--thus the smaller the body the greater the tides.By the time you're down to red dwarfs the tidal problems become severe, you get tidal locking which makes it much harder to have an inhabitable world.  Go smaller still and you had better also have a year that matches the day length of the star or you're going to be spiraling pretty fast.However, there's another way you could have an inhabitable world without a visible star:  instead of a brown dwarf how about a degenerate mass?  While it would still glow I'm thinking of tidal heating rather than radiative heating.Consider a world:  It's in an elliptical orbit around a degenerate body.  The atmosphere is opaque due to volcanic dust.  The oceans are small which is good as the tides are incredible.  All land masses are thin, enlongated masses oriented to let the tides pass by.  (This is the result of erosion, the tides will smash down anything that doesn't present a narrow cross section.)Even the ground flexes greatly due to the tide although this isn't too obvious as it doesn't flow.  The flexing produces a lot of heat, though--that's what keeps the planet inhabitable.  Each flex causes volcanoes to spew lava but it also brings water--the result is clouds of ash and steam.  The steam quickly recondenses and rains out most of the ash but some of it is thrown high enough to avoid being rained out--the result is an opaque stratosphere but the troposphere remains breatheable if you're away from the volcanoes.The lands around the volcanoes are no-go zones due to the ash (although with enough magic you can survive there), the spotty reports people have of the volcano lands have led to the belief that they are hell.Boat traffic is out of the question (nobody has even invented water-borne transport), inter-island transport is by flight or magic only--you can have very different cultures and populations only a few miles away.There's obviously no photosynthesis, life's energy source is chemically powered bacteria.  (Think of the deep ocean vent communities of Earth.)</blockquote>

Verification