Science Fiction Planets

[Jimpy]

A couple of days ago scientists announced they found a planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani, the star which Babylon 5 orbits (the scientists left off the Babylon 5 part). Last August, scientists announced they discoverd a planet orbiting 40 Eridani, the planet that Vulcan orbits (the scientists most certainly mentioned this, Star Trek rates higher than Babylon 5, I guess). NOTE- I am aware of the fact that these are gas giant planets that have been discovered.

My question is, are any other science fiction planets orbiting real stars? Do these stars have known planets? Is there a reason why both Vulcan and Babylon 5 are in the constellation Eridanus? Could J. Michael Straczynski be copying Star Trek? Is Star Trek copying Babylon 5? What about Star Wars? Could a Star Destroyer take out a Vorlon ship? How come about a billion people have appeared in both Babylon 5 and some incarnation of Star Trek but no one from either have appeared in Star Wars? How come when I type "Babylon 5" unless I do it slowly it comes out "Babyon 5"? I got an "A" in typing about a billion years ago didn't I? Why don't I have this problem with Star Trek or Star Wars? Or Battlestar Gallactica? Are they ever going to make the Battlestar Gallactica movie they've been talking about for years? And speaking of movies, did Lucas put a cute 5 year old girl in Episode II as a Jedi trainee just to appeal to the young kids? Is she Episode II's Jar Jar Binks, so to speak? And what about Men in Black 2, is that still on schedule? And are any of the stars mentioned in the first MIB real stars? Are there any other science fiction planets orbitng real stars?

[jasonb94]

Wow, looks like someone oughta lay off the rock! ;)

[TampaFlyer]

Jar Jar will be back in Episode 2, that much I know.

[BlockHead]

Yes. Yes. Yes. Possibly. No. What about it? Yes. They did. Because you didn't type the "L". No. They don't need an "L". Maybe 2 L's are easier for you to type. No. We'll see. Possibly. Yes. Yes. Yes.

[kanicbird]

shouldn't this be in MPSIMS???

[Derleth]

Jimpy: Lay off the stimulants. Your mind is going way too fast.
k2dave: Jimpy actually had a decent GQ question before his tangents caught up with him. I truly hope his suspicions are unfounded, that the writers of the shows used stars that were then known to be sun-type and therefore pretty likely to have at least some planets. It would be a huge black eye if the astronomers were just copying from popular shows so blatantly just to boost popularity.

[Lemur866]

Look, when you're a science fiction writer and you have a nice alien planet, you often want to stick it in a plausible place. So you go to your astronomy books, and find a couple of close sun-like stars. Tau Ceti, Alpha Centauri, etc. are good ones.

Bad ones would be Sirius and Procyon. Although they are very close, they are much more energetic than Sol and are pretty young stars. Even Vega is young. In general the brightest stars aren't the best candidates since they are mostly giants. Alpha Centauri is the exception because it's *really* close. But the other close stars are mostly very low magnitude.

[Chronos]

Tau Ceti, mentioned by Lemur866, is the closest (about 20 ly, I believe) single G-type (the same type as the Sun) star to the Sun, and is the home of Aurora in Asimov's robot novels, Avalon in Niven's The Legacy of Heorot, and Port from the anthology series The Fleet, among many others. Many of the stars from Star Trek are also real, such as Wolf 359 (there was a battle there with the Borg, right?), a red dwarf in our neighborhood. Vega was the origin of the signal in the book/movie Contact, although, as mentioned, it's probably too young to have a civilization. Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox from Douglass Adams' Hitchhiker series are from Betelgeuse, and almost all of the stars mentioned in Men in Black really exist. None of the stars from Star Wars are known to exist, but that's a different galaxy, and there's very few named stars outside the Milky Way. Most of these stars, of course, have not had planets found around them yet, but no star has yet been proven to be without planets, and it's considered likely that most stars (or at least single stars) do, and we just don't see them. Of the stars I've mentioned here, the only ones easily visible to the naked eye are Vega, a first-magnitude (bright) star nearly directly overhead in the evenings, and Betelgeuse, which'll be visible in the fall. Tau Ceti is a bit faint for the naked eye, but if conditions are good, it's visible, and Epsilon Eridani and Alpha Centauri are both too far south to see from most of the United States.

[Cartooniverse]

Originally posted by TampaFlyer
Jar Jar will be back in Episode 2, that much I know.

Small world. I MEAN, SMALL WORLD !!!! How small? It's 2:40am, in Bryant Park- behind the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I'm enjoying what passes for an omlette, on a meal break from setting up for "Good Morning America". My meal partner is a delightful man, a brilliant cameraman....and the father of the actor who played Jar-Jar. Yes, he'll be back in Episode II. He's in Aussi Land now, shooting the picture. ( I cannot call it a film, because- GRRRRR- it's not being shot ON film !! !).

Who knew??

Cartooniverse

[Cervaise]

Pulling a random thread out of that tangle of tangents:

Men in Black 2 is stalled for the forseeable future because it would be prohibitively expensive to produce. None of the principals had a sequel clause, which throws a major monkey wrench into the finances. Will Smith had signed for the original before Independence Day went through the roof; his asking price is much higher now. Ditto, to a lesser extent, for Tommy Lee Jones. It was also a semi-breakthrough for director Barry Sonnenfeld, whose biggest movie prior to MiB was The Addams Family. Spielberg gets his cut as executive producer. You gotta figure on at least seven or eight mil for the screenplay, too (original draft plus a dozen mercenaries for uncredited polishing). All in all, you're looking at seventy or eighty million above the line, easy, before you even get into the shoot, let alone post, which for a special-effects-heavy flick like this will doubtless flirt with nine figures all told. The total makes this not a good gamble for any production.

Wow. A whole lot of information only peripherally related to a throwaway aside in the OP. Not totally a hijack, but close.

[Johanna]

Paul Theroux wrote in The Great Railway Bazaar, as he was riding a train through Malaysia, his impression of the place names he was passing:

"Names like science fiction planets: Tanah, Bidor, Klang."

[Gunslinger]

Vulcan was around looong before Star Trek--the original planet Vulcan was "discovered" back in the 1800s, orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury (hence the fire-associated name). Turns out, it didn't exist. Oops.

[Chronos]

Gunslinger's right, of course... Another planet was hypothesized to explain a few minor peculiarities in Mercury's orbit, peculiarities which we now know to be due to effects from General Relativity. I was just trying to answer in a science-fiction context, as the OP was asking (or seemed to).

[Jimpy]

Hmm, maybe I was on drugs when I posted. My reasoning was that my "question" was actually two questions, so I turned it into seventeen questions off the top of my head. But now that I am rested, it looks pretty stupid.

Some random thoughts on the responses to my original random thoughts--

I knew that Jar Jar Binks was in Episode II (and probably III) but George Lucas has stated that Jar Jar becomes a more powerful character, and perhaps less appealing to very young kids, so I wondered if Phoebe Yiamkiati (http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/cast/phoebeyiamkiati.html), who plays a jedi trainee, might be thrown in to get the youth crowd more interested.

Cervaise points out some very good reasons why Men in Black 2 might not get made, except he is wrong about the price for the screenplay. Robert Gordon (best know for Galaxy Quest) is writing the screenplay for MIB 2 and he isn't all that pricey, maybe half a mil tops. Negotiations are currently underway with the major stars. Will Smith has read an early version of the screenplay and thinks it's great. Barry Sonnenfeld hs told variety that MIB 2 is likely to be his next project after Big Trouble . The thing that could have really bogged down production, the sequal rights from the comic book creator, was included in the original contract so it's not a problem. Right now, things look good. I actually knew tha answer to this one when I asked it.

[fredicus]

Anyone remember the game Frontier ?
I had the Elite2 version which had just about every star I'd ever heard of, and then some :)
But some these suns also planets, I can't remember if any of them might fit( overlap ? ) into the Star Wars / Star Trek /Babylon 5 cycles.
Anyone got a machine slow enough to play it ?
LOL

[SPOOFE]

All I know is that the planet Tatooine really DOES orbit the double stars, Tatoo I and Tatoo II. Corellia really DOES orbit Corell. And Yavin 4 really DOES orbit the gas giant Yavin.

But we won't find out about it for another billion years, so until then, get more sugar into your diet.

[Bear_Nenno]

Can a planet really have two suns?? Wouldn't it suffer from some horrible climate changes during the year? What kind of orbit would it have?

[Phobos]

Originally posted by Bear_Nenno
Can a planet really have two suns?? Wouldn't it suffer from some horrible climate changes during the year? What kind of orbit would it have?

I think it's possible, but rarer...finding a stable orbit would be tough. Many proto-planets would be pitched out of a mutli-star system.

I suppose there may be stable orbits close to one of the stars provided the second star was distant enough. The closer the stars are to each other, the tougher it would be to find a stable orbit.

As far as climates go...the planet doesn't care. That's more of a question for the probability of life arising/surviving there.

[Sister Vigilante]

The thing about Battlestar Galactica is (for those of you who just couldn't live without this info), Richard Hatch is gung-ho about making the next film. He even went so far as to have a "preview" filmed. He's also written two books about the continuing adventures. He shows up at sci-fi conventions to plug all of the above.

The problem with all of this is, Richard Hatch has no rights to the story. And the people who do, aren't interested.

[Cervaise]

Just a clarification, and then I'm done harping on this:

he is wrong about the price for the screenplay. Robert Gordon (best know for Galaxy Quest) is writing the screenplay for MIB 2 and he isn't all that pricey

Yeah, maybe, if he were the only writer. I guarantee you they've got line items for rewrites, and that they total a minimum, minimum, of $5 mil set aside for all the hired guns they're planning to bring in. Not a single Big Summer Movie goes before the cameras without a half-dozen writers having had a crack at it, regardless of who gets screen credit -- and they all get paid.

[Darqangelle]

MY 2 pennies...


Star Wars was "a long long time ago" in a galaxy yada yada yada...


So, seeing as Star Wars was history and Babylon 5/Trek stuff is in the future, the chances of overlapping storyline is really slim.



-Too Darq to see

[Ike Witt]

Personally, I can't wait until somebody finds Arrakis. I need some damn Melange.

[Chronos]

There's a couple of other ways to stably put a planet into orbit around a binary star... One is to put the planet at the fourth or fifth Lagrange point of the system, in which case the two suns would always be separated by exactly 60o in the sky. The other is to put the two stars close together, and the planet out at a significant distance from both, in which case the suns would always be close together in the sky. Offhand, judging from sunset scenes in the Star Wars movies, I'm guessing that Tatooine is in the last category, but if the planet's that far away, you need some pretty large and hot stars to heat the planet. There's also the possibility that the planet is in an unstable orbit, and has just been lucky so far, but this is unlikely in the extreme.

[yabob]

An interesting take on a planet in a binary star system may be found in Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy.

[dtilque]

Originally posted by Chronos
One is to put the planet at the fourth or fifth Lagrange point of the system, in which case the two suns would always be separated by exactly 60o in the sky.
Actually, not exactly 60o. If you look at the orbits of the Trojan asteroids (which are in Jupiter's Lagrange points), you will find that they oscillate about those points. At times, some are quite far from the points. They also can escape from that orbit.

The problem with planets in Lagrange points is that they probably can't form there. Or at least not very large ones. When the solar system formed, pretty much all the disk material at Jupiter's distance from the sun ended up in Jupiter (the Tojan asteroids were captured from the main belt). I would expect the same to happen in a double star system.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally posted by Chronos
and Epsilon Eridani and Alpha Centauri are both too far south to see from most of the United States.
Actually Epsilon Eri is at about the same lattitude as Orion's feet, so unless they live in Alaska Americans can usually see it in the wintertime, when Orion rides high in the southern sky. Of course, it's only about third magnitude or dimmer, so you probably will need binoculars if you live in a city. But it's worth it if you're interested--you get to see something that is rare in our skies: most naked-eye stars are giants and supergiants that are much further away; Epsilon Eri is a close sunlike star.
If memory serves, it's actually a little bit dimmer than
our sun, so an Earthlike planet would have to orbit somewhat closer to its sun than ours does.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Originally posted by Cartooniverse
Originally posted by TampaFlyer
Jar Jar will be back in Episode 2, that much I know.
( I cannot call it a film, because- GRRRRR- it's not being shot ON film !! !).
I applaud your precise choice of words. I'm the same way...I have to call surf guitarist Dick Dale's creations "tunes" and not "songs" because they aren't "sung", only "played". Though "Only" hardly seems like an appropriate word to use in this context.

[Jimpy]

Cervaise
I guarantee you they've got line items for rewrites, and that they total a minimum, minimum, of $5 mil set aside for all the hired guns they're planning to bring in. Not a single Big Summer Movie goes before the cameras without a half-dozen writers having had a crack at it, regardless of who gets screen credit -- and they all get paid.

A producer only has to pay, $88,614 for an original screenplay and treatment. For a full rewrite they only have to pay $23,611. For polishing a screenplay, $11,804. For lesser rewrites, even less, down to a minimum of $723 (source-Writers Guild of America).

With the exception of Crichton, Esterhaus and a few others, nobody gets paid that much to be a writer. OK some may get $250,000 or so, but there is a huge gap between the top few and the next tier. And most movies pay minumim (if that, see below) for rewrites unless they bring in a bigger name writer to save a floundering script. Less than one film in ten puts out a million for a script.

In all probabilty there is going to be a writers strike next May. There are three central issues currently in negotiation, "Creativity rights" this is going to be the stickler, residuals on electronic media and ...unpaid rewrites.

There are currently 46 cases against 5 movie studios and assorted production compaines involving having writers rewrite for free their scripts. All 55 writers involved had to be suponenaed by their own union to testify because they were afraid that the producers wouldn't ever hire them again if they volintarily testified. And these are just the known cases.

Writes are treated like dirt in Hollywood (they have to sign a contract when they write a movie stating that the movie production company, not the author is the "author" of the movie). THey are like kleenex as far as the producers are concerned and they rarely make over minimum.

[toadspittle]

Originally posted by adam yax
Personally, I can't wait until somebody finds Arrakis. I need some damn Melange.

Actually, Arrakis is one of the few planets listed in the Dune series that orbits a real star.

http://dune.servint.com/dune_terminology.htm#A

ARRAKIS
the planet known as Dune; third planet of Canopus



http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/hr/2326.html


CANOPUS

Menelaus's helmsman (also Egyptian seaport)

Other Names

Suhel; Suhail.
Alpha Carinae
HR 2326
HD 45348

Data

RA 06 23 57.1
Dec -52 41 45
V -0.72
B-V +0.15
Spectral Type F0II

Canopus is the 2nd brightest star in the sky.

In the constellation Carina.

[tracer]

For excruciatingly detailed data on these and many other real-life stars, visit the Internet Stellar Database at http://www.stellar-database.com.

And I'm not saying that just because I built the site, either. ;)

[Sofa King]

Just to clarify, it would appear as if the Babylon 5 folks share the same mailing address with Spock.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/epsilon_vulcan_000804.html

What I want to know is, is the planet going to be named Vulcan? I sure think it should. Who decides?

[matt_mcl]

Well, hell, they got the first space shuttle to be named Enterprise.

[Sofa King]

And another one named Endeavor after Rendezvous With Rama. And Discovery, of course, was the home of HAL 9000.

Arthur C. Clarke seems to have cleaned up in the naming department there, no?

[APB9999]

I hold in my hands the September issue of Scientific American, which contains a list of all 44 planets known at the time of publication (outside our solar system) and the stars they orbit. Canopus, HD45348, is not listed. Sorry, melangophiles.

The article is interesting and specifically addresses the issue of planets around binary stars, which are easier to detect than those around single stars by one of the two available methods for planet detection. The older method (meaning, like, last year) was the detection of wobbles in stars due to the planetary attractions of large planets (actually, the direct observations are frequency shifts in the starlight due to the wobble). The newer method is measuring the change in the amount of light as planets pass in front of the stars. It has the potential to detect planets even down to only about twice the size of earth. There are problems, though, and not every star can be examined this way (the orientation of the planet's orbit has to be correct, for example).

Anyway, I don't want to repeat the whole article, so I'll just refer you to it. It's the September 2000 issue, pg. 58.
Unfortunately, this (http://www.sciam.com/2000/0900issue/0900quicksummary.html) is all that's available of the article online.

[LazarusLong42]

Originally posted by Phobos
Originally posted by Bear_Nenno
Can a planet really have two suns?? Wouldn't it suffer from some horrible climate changes during the year? What kind of orbit would it have?

I think it's possible, but rarer...finding a stable orbit would be tough. Many proto-planets would be pitched out of a mutli-star system.


There are many stable orbits available.

In a binary system, the two stars orbit each other, first of all. There are two important numbers for determining the orbit, those numbers being the minimum and maximum distances between the two stars.

If a planet orbits the gravitational center of the binary system at a distance greater than about five times the maximum distance between the stars, it should have a stable orbit.

If a planet orbits one star at a distance less than about a fifth the minimum distance between the stars, it should be stable as well. (This would be the most likely, IMO; the Alpha Centauri binary, for instance, orbit each other with a minimum distance of about 11 AU, 11 times the Earth's orbital distance.)

There are also at least two stable 2:3 resonance orbits, which are akin to the orbits of Neptune and Pluto about Sol. In this case, one of the binary stars and the planet in question would be in the resonant orbits, with the other star, almost certainly larger, at the center of the system.

A better question than "Is the orbit possible?" is "Will there be enough mass left in the system to produce planets after two suns have been created?" 99% of the mass of our solar system is in the sun, and something around 50% of the remaining mass is in Jupiter. After forming two stars, they may simply suck up all the mass of the system, leaving no planets.

LL