- #1
bcohen1
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Hi everybody,
I apologize if this has been asked already - I searched for a similar topic to no avail. My question regards something touched upon briefly in Olaf Stapledon's book Star Maker. Stapledon writes of interstellar travel being acheived by detaching a planet from a solar system and hurtling it toward a nearby star. So that the inhabitants of said planet don't freeze to death, they would somehow illuminate a satellite that would then orbit the planet, acting as a tiny mobile sun.
My initial question is, how would you achieve this hypothetically? Would you irridiate the moon somehow? What kind of reaction would you need to create?
Furthermore, if (again, extremely hypothetically) our sun became dimmer and we wanted to illuminate our own moon without necessarily detaching the Earth from our solar system, what would the effect be? How would an illuminated moon (for lack of a better term) affect our tide, planetary wobble, gravitational attraction to the other planets, etc.
I'm just really curious about this and I know it's pretty far out, but I'm not a scientist of any kind and I don't really know any scientists, so I was hoping that somebody here might be able to help. Thanks in advance for any thoughts and I hope you all have a nice day!
Kind regards,
Ben Cohen
I apologize if this has been asked already - I searched for a similar topic to no avail. My question regards something touched upon briefly in Olaf Stapledon's book Star Maker. Stapledon writes of interstellar travel being acheived by detaching a planet from a solar system and hurtling it toward a nearby star. So that the inhabitants of said planet don't freeze to death, they would somehow illuminate a satellite that would then orbit the planet, acting as a tiny mobile sun.
My initial question is, how would you achieve this hypothetically? Would you irridiate the moon somehow? What kind of reaction would you need to create?
Furthermore, if (again, extremely hypothetically) our sun became dimmer and we wanted to illuminate our own moon without necessarily detaching the Earth from our solar system, what would the effect be? How would an illuminated moon (for lack of a better term) affect our tide, planetary wobble, gravitational attraction to the other planets, etc.
I'm just really curious about this and I know it's pretty far out, but I'm not a scientist of any kind and I don't really know any scientists, so I was hoping that somebody here might be able to help. Thanks in advance for any thoughts and I hope you all have a nice day!
Kind regards,
Ben Cohen