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Could you live on tidally locked planets?
A tidally locked extrasolar planet with an atmosphere to generate enough heat transport from the day side to the night side would perhaps have balmy enough temperatures for life to exist even if the sun never shines. So far, the existence of life outside Earth is of course completely hypothetical.
How would life evolve on tidally locked planets?
But tidal locking could result in wide climate variations, a result that could threaten the evolution of life on the surface of these planets. The far side of the planet would be frigid, since it would never see the star. Its only source of warmth would be winds from the warmer half of the planet.
What would a tidally locked planet look like?
A tidally locked planet shows only one face to its star, with implications for its climate. In one scenario, the planet resembles a giant eyeball, as shown in this illustration. The cold eyeball planet has a liquid ocean on the light side, while an icy shell covers the dark side.
How do things become tidally locked?
When gravitational forces slow or accelerate the rotation of an astronomical body it can become tidally locked to its parent body (in this example, a planet is tidally locked to its star). Under these conditions the orbiting body always shows the same face to its parent body.
How does an object become tidally locked?
Over many millions of years, the interaction forces changes to their orbits and rotation rates as a result of energy exchange and heat dissipation. When one of the bodies reaches a state where there is no longer any net change in its rotation rate over the course of a complete orbit, it is said to be tidally locked.
Which planets in our Solar System are tidally locked?
Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to each other. Charon is massive enough that the barycenter of Pluto’s system lies outside of Pluto; thus Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered to be a binary system….Solar System.
Parent body | Tidally-locked satellites |
---|---|
Pluto | Charon (Pluto is itself locked to Charon) |
How does a planet become tidally locked?
If the rotation is too slow and the orbit is fast, the bulge lags behind as the planet orbits forward, and the gravitational pull of the star drags it forward. No matter what, the planet gets a tug until its rotation is exactly the same period of time as its orbit. When that happens, it’s tidally locked.
What happens when a planet’s orbit is too slow?
That shift happens every time the planet rotates. If the rotation is too slow and the orbit is fast, the bulge lags behind as the planet orbits forward, and the gravitational pull of the star drags it forward. No matter what, the planet gets a tug until its rotation is exactly the same period of time as its orbit.
Does the planet’s mass get pulled all the way back?
It doesn’t necessarily get pulled all the way back, but it gets shifted a little bit. That shift happens every time the planet rotates. If the rotation is too slow and the orbit is fast, the bulge lags behind as the planet orbits forward, and the gravitational pull of the star drags it forward.
How does the Earth stretch and move?
This stretching doesn’t happen immediately, though. It takes time for the planet to stretch its solid mass towards the sun and to settle back, and while it is stretching and settling, it is moving. At first, it is moving in two different ways. It is rotating on its axis, the way the Earth does to produce night and day.