Saturday, 21 April 2018

Small Celestial Bodies

Might a celestial body much smaller than Earth be able to hold a breathable atmosphere? I know of three fictional examples - two of them written by Poul Anderson, natch.

(i) In a novel by Jules Verne, a small, inhabited part of the Earth's surface is impossibly carried around the Solar System and back to Earth by a comet but I found Verne's text unreadable.

(ii) In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, gravity control is used to terraform asteroids.

(iii) In Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors," the planet Nike has only 0.15 Terran mass and very low gravity but holds an atmosphere and biosphere because it is so old that its weak gravitational field has had enough time to pull heavier elements into an atmosphere-generating solid core.

Thus, one example from Verne and two from Anderson.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!"

And the sun of Nike was so old that it was starting to leave the main sequence. This was to cause confusion because the knowledge that Nike's sun was so old was lost after the Empire fell. Many people, incluing Roan Tom and his wives, originally thought Nike was orbiting a young sun. Much of the plot of "A Tragedy of Errors" sprang from that mistake.

Sean