Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to One rather obvious thing Nick Hoffman missed.

Re: One rather obvious thing Nick Hoffman missed.
Nick Hoffman — (archived)

I'm sure there are some "escape clauses" by being a Moon of a gas giant, but they're not quite so simple.

For the tidal case you describe, the isostatic response time of a simple load function that makes a planet Egg or Oval shaped is going to be less than 100,000 years, for a planet as large and internally warm as Earth. (Remember that glacial rebound has raised the depressed former ice areas by up to 1 km in 10,000 years)

An escape may come for a small (Mars sized) body with much less ocean, but tidal stirring to give it constant tectonics to build mountains and land. It would be tide-locked to its primary, but would have a day/night cycle of one local month as it orbited.

The Gas giant would need to be in the habitable zone, of course, and the planet would need to retain its atmosphere, so perhaps a bit bigger than Mars would be good?

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