Recent content by Fennelgiraffe

Update: I found another source, with a different formula, and this one comes out to 480 billion years. Now I don't know what to think. I know it's a very, very rough estimate, because neither version is taking the influence of other planets into consideration. The difference between 5.5 and...

That's also just about the same time the inner edge of the HZ will move beyond Earth's orbit -- give or take a few hundred million years. So things should be getting toasty anyway.

I need to check a calculation for reasonableness. When I plug in the values for Earth and the Sun, I get a rough approximation of tidelock about 5.5 Gy after formation of the solar system. Is that anywhere close to the right answer?

So the moon's mass does matter, but no one has already done the work of deriving it? Thanks, that answers a big part of my question. You can't nail down that fraction more specifically? Oh well, I guess I see now why I wasn't finding the answer I wanted. Do you happen to have a feel...

I'm trying to understand the Hill Sphere formula. (Yes, I've already been to Wikipedia.) I notice that it doesn't take the mass of the satellite into consideration. Is that because the mass of the satellite has no effect, or is it a simplification based on the assumption that the mass of the...