Klown Kar Planet: Last Days Before Tidal Lock

[Max Hofbauer]

Our moon is a naturally ocurring lopsided body. That must mean that the center of gravity is outside the center of geometry. The only way I can imagine such a mass distribution, requires a basically solid interior. Otherwise the material would be subjected to a slow flow, creating heat and dampening the movement. It would also mean that any bodies presenting a slight off-axis (geometrical axis, that is) rotation MUST have a solid interior and MUST have been tidally locked to another body at some point of their existence. The most probable kind of movement will not be the classical (linear) pendular action, but rather like a pendulum describing circles. You can ifigure it like the movement of a precessing top (without accounting for the spin itself), a wobbling movement. Don´t picture it as a stop-n-go movement, like a bicicle wheel. For more clarity you can make a conceptual model, using a ball with some excentric inner weight. From the surface of such an world, the sun would be discribing circles in the sky if the observer is in the center of the sun-facing side, and arches if the observer moves to the "twilight-zone". By the way; the twilight zone will probabely be best to live in, a ring-shaped area, trapped between too hot and too cold. Check the kind of movement in this video on lunar libration:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...Lunar_libration_with_phase_Oct_2007_450px.gif
The other possible movement would be pendular in nature, featuring a stop-n-go kind of motion (like a swinging bike wheel). It will probabely be much slower. There would be two distinct, crescent-shaped, habitable zones (on meridians 180 and -180), stretching from "pole to pole", but not quite connecting...

 

[votingmachine]

You might be able to hand wave some mass imbalance with snow and water. Water would tidally flow towards the sun side. Snow could fall on the opposite side. As it rotates one way, the snow melts and cools the incoming ocean. The far side of the ocean is receding, and fresh snow is falling on the newly exposed ground. It requires a deep ocean (past tectonic weirdness as the planetary stress went crazy) that faces inward. Otherwise the planet would be relatively evenly distributed mass-wise, but with a bulging water mass, opposite a low density snow ... with enough hand waving it might sound plausible.

Or maybe a volcanic weird assymmetry ...

 

[votingmachine]

I thought of another possible way to make it work. Use the North Pole / South Pole wobble as the movement (axial precession), instead of the movement along the rotational axis of the poles. So hypothesize a planet that like Earth had rotation, and a wobble, where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres get differing day length. Then the rotation stops but not the wobble.

To see what I am getting at, look at the bottom graphic showing a wobbling Earth at the bottom. Make it a bit more extreme, and you've got your dynamics, although the axis of rotation is now a bit different.
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/sun_radiation_at_earth.html

It is again a bit of a hand waving explanation, but it might be possible to throw in some water tides to help create a mass assymettry.

There is a table of Solar system axial tilts here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt

A big tilt, with a tidal lock of the side facing the sun ... that seems to work, although it takes a full year for the "day" cycle of movement to occur.

 

[DET]

Some interesting thoughts coming out of this. Another thought for a weird planet would be one that is a moon of a jovian primary, in a polar orbit (but not tidally locked). Such a planet would have one pole facing the sun for part of the year, then sunrises and sunsets, then the other pole. During the polar summers, the sun would describe a circle around the zenith, which would get larger and larger (and more tilted as you move away from the planet's pole), until it starts dipping below the horizon. Kind of like what the arctic gets on Earth, except much more extreme (At summer solstice, at the pole, the sun would be directly overhead). But during the "winter", the jovian primary would supply a lot of light. It would be an interesting annual cycle.

 

[Artribution]

A friend points out that if you have less sunlight, that means less heat transfer and therefore less wind. So a little further from the sun, the planet we were talking about could have perpetual monsoons instead of perpetual hurricane winds, if you wanted it to.