10 chopped tomatos, 10 pureed tomatos, 10 pureed tomatillos, juice from 5 limes, 10 chopped jalapenos, 3 teaspoons salt, 1 cup chopped cilantro, 1 chopped onion, 1 cup chopped green onion, 1 or 2 chopped habanero peppers (for extra nail-grinding)...
I stumbled upon this progressive comparison of the sizes of our planet, our neighboring planets, the sun, our neighboring stars, up to the largest stars.
Posted by Nick at 10:39 PM
Powered by Blogger. DownRight Blogger Theme v1.2 created by (© 2007) Thur Broeders
5 comments:
Nick, now don't go all Carl Sagan on us.
I've been to Antares once. I didn't think it was that big.
I once started a novel about an Earth colony on a planet orbiting Arcturus. Silly me- there could never be a hospitable planet orbiting a star that big.
(I wrote like 3 pages, then I quit)
Why not? Put it at the right distance for enough solar energy, and fast enough so that it doesn't get pulled in by gravity... Wouldn't that work?
Lots of those big stars burn so hot that their peak level of radiation is in the high ultraviolet- so unless you've got a huge ozone layer, your inhabitants either get fried or evolve into beings with high UV tolerance. Also, larger stars like arcturus will only burn for a few million years- some of the larger ones we already know about may have already been burning for several million years (theres no way to tell), and so could blow at any time. You wouldn't want to start a colony in a star system that may shortly become a large black hole.
Another problem is that while the star is very very large, the mass is not proportionally larger, so in order to assure the correct amount of solar radiation the planet would have to be orbiting so far away that it's solar year would be hundreds of our years. That would make seasons rather long (assuming the planet had any tilt). Anyway, its not impossible, but the odds of there being hospitable planets around stars like that are slim, especially considering most of them are binaries, which would mess things up even worse.
Post a Comment