About
Comments on some of the odd stuff which comes into my life.
I honestly don't see why people find this interesting, but clearly they do.
Subscribe
Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog,
brought to you by the wonders of RSS.
My serious essays In addition to my babbling here, I do write serious essays on serious topics. You can read the current stuff as a blog, or look at some of the more popular essays in an archive.
Links
These are a few of my favourite links.
Tue, 05 Jun 2007
The real 'hot planet' has been found (15:24)
Imagine a world of water, circling close to a low output sun, so close that the top of the atmosphere is nothing but vapor, and the gravity creates pressure at the bottom of the atmosphere so great that the hard surface of the planet is miles of ice VII at 300°C! Okay, stop imagining, this is not a science fiction story, it's a real planet only 30 light years away, circling a star called called GJ 436.Being such a great setting for a science fiction novel, and so close that exchanges via radio are possible, it would be a perfect setting for some talented writer like Hal Clement. Clement wrote a neat story called Iceworld in 1953, which along with Sand of Mars was my introduction to SF. In Iceworld a visitor from a hot planet comes to visit Earth in a hot suit. I got my copy autographed in the early 1970s at a science fiction convention.
Of course if we went there, another more famous Hal Clement novel called Mission of Gravity would apply, the hot water world around GJ 436 has a mass of about 12 times the Earth and appropriate gravity for a Neptune sized planet. In Mission of Gravity the planet rotated so fast that the effective gravity at the equator was livable by humans, with full gravity at the poles. I don't think we are ready to visit a planet with a surface at 300°C regardless of gravity, but it's an interesting thought, as is speculation on what might evolve if there is a layer of superfluid water between the vapor and the ice.