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Someone already calculated in 1950 that such planet is very unlikely to have an atmosphere. Temperature difference is about 300 degrees celsius and most gasses
by jkot 12y ago
Someone already calculated in 1950 that such planet is very unlikely to have an atmosphere. Temperature difference is about 300 degrees celsius and most gasses would either froze on cold side, or escape to space on warm side.
In best cases you get permanent hurricane (Venus)
- mapt 12y agoI have seen more recent depictions of tidally locked planets that have thick enough atmospheres that winds suffice to do enough cooling & heating to sustain the system.
- semaphoreP 12y agoAren't many of those planets gas giants though? Which won't be able to harbor life.
- monk_e_boy 12y agoWouldn't there be a layer somewhere deep where water is liquid? It'd be boiling up in clouds to eventually freeze (which I guess would be a looong way up) or sink and turn to steam? Freeze?
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoRight, that idea that water would flow constantly across the terminator is nuts. The water would blow to the cold side and freeze there. Also, give all that was said, probably no life there at all. Our Moon may have been instrumental in generating life. Tides and rotation meant constant motion of water on shores, combined with day/night heat/cold wet/dry. Every grain of sand on every beach was a different biochemical petri dish for billions of years, resulting ultimately in the cell. A tide-locked no-day-night planet would likely be sterile.
- namuol 12y agoI think there's a lot more room for speculation. We haven't been able to observe nearly enough tidally-locked planets to make general rules about them. Such new types of planets are likely to exhibit all sorts of phenomena that act as counterexamples to the patterns seen in our own solar system.
- lisper 12y ago> The water would blow to the cold side and freeze there. You missed the part where the glaciers on the night side get big enough to flow despite being frozen.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoDepends on how much water.
- sampo 12y ago> Every grain of sand on every beach was a different biochemical petri dish for billions of years It didn't take billions of years for life to appear on Earth.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoRight; it took 1 billion (for cells)
- sampo 12y agoPlanet Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. And while the interpretation of the earliest fossils of life is debatable, we can say that some 3.6 billion years old remains probably are fossils of bacteria. But right after the formation, the surface was still molten lava, and there was heavy meteorite bombardment [1]. So from the time the planet had cooled down, and the solar system had calmed down, to the beginning of life (which could have happened earlier than there are fossils left) could have been anything from mere 100 million years to over 600 million years, for all we know. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean