The planet’s atmosphere would feature something akin to Earth’s water cycle, but instead with sand cycling between solid and gaseous states. From the hotter, lower levels of the atmosphere, with temperatures close to 1,000C, silicate vapour would rise up, cool and form microscopic grains of sand, too small to see. Eventually, these clouds of sand dust would become dense enough that they begin to rain back down to the lower layers of the atmosphere. Below a certain level, the sand would sublime back into vapour, completing the cycle.
“The clouds would be like a hazy dust,” said Decin. “And these sand particles are streaming around at extremely high velocity. A few kilometres per second.”
Jesus. That sand is raining down on you at like 6800kph/11,000mph if it’s 5km/s. Those water cutting machines barely reach 1km/s and they’re used to cut steel and titanium.
“The planet’s atmosphere would feature something akin to Earth’s water cycle, but instead with sand cycling between solid and gaseous states. From the hotter, lower levels of the atmosphere, with temperatures close to 1,000C, silicate vapour would rise up, cool and form microscopic grains of sand, too small to see. Eventually, these clouds of sand dust would become dense enough that they begin to rain back down to the lower layers of the atmosphere. Below a certain level, the sand would sublime back into vapour, completing the cycle.”
Yep! They go through a phase of being edge-on so become incredibly flat from our perspective. That also means there’s a peak where the rings are most visible which will be in 2032.
There’s a lot of good books out there with these phases detailed as well as guides for other planets. Highly recommend it for anyone getting into astronomy.
Wood doesn’t burn or rot in the lifeless vacuum of space, but it will incinerate into a fine ash upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere — making it a surprisingly useful, biodegradable material for future satellites.
No, actually. Metal doesn’t burn up, it melts to slag and disintegrates, but the metal particles don’t become gas the way carbon does. Then you just have a bunch of a space debris and reactive, aerosolized metal particles knocking around the upper atmostphere. Aluminum Oxide ash can float to the ground, or it can cause ozone decomposition. We’re not entirely sure which is worse based on the amount coming back from satellites, but the number of satellites we’re sending up is increasing rapidly. So it wouldn’t hurt if they were a little less toxic.
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