Hmmmoooonns

[RogueGunslinger]

Shouldn't both of them be red? How does Lirathu remain white in our reddish sky?

What makes Jihae red, do you think? Is it a red dwarf, far away?

That black moon. How can a moon be black? How can you see something in space that is black? Is it just an abscence of stars? There are no stars...


Just some random armageddon thoughts.

[Wasteland Raider]

The black moon you should Find Out IC about.

[Wasteland Raider]

No, no I did not, because the answer to your question is something you can Find Out IC.

[LauraMars]

Maybe these moons are different from earth moons and can generate their own different colored light.

And the black moon is...A BLACK LIGHT!  EVERYBODY DANCE!

[Sephiroto]

Most star systems (over 50% if I recall) are bianary (2+ stars).  Were it not for the lunar phases, it wouldn't surprise me if Jihae was a red dwarf.

This is a total derail, but I was just imagining our solar system in the days where our sun begins to grow into a red giant (Suk-Krath?)  Were Jupiter to acrete enough hydrogen mass from the sun, other gas giants, or a passing cloud of gas it could go main phase as a red dwarf.  Were this the case, we could have a Suk-Krath (red giant Sun), Jihae (red dwarf Jupiter), and Lirathu (Moon) system over our desert world that's so hot because our Sun is expanding and making our world get very hot.

Interesting?

[RogueGunslinger]

Would the mass of jupiter change enough to de-stabilize our orbit? Do multiple star systems have figure 8 orbits or something... never thought of that before.

[AmandaGreathouse]

That black moon. How can a moon be black? How can you see something in space that is black? Is it just an abscence of stars? There are no stars...

I imagine it works kind of like when we have a new moon and you can see its outline but it looks black in the sky. And with other moons to illuminate the outline, I wouldn't think you would need stars.

r.a.t.: I somehow went a long time ago from a Tuluki fangirl to acknowledging this: I generally dislike Allanak as a culture and don't like its surrounding wilderness... but I like the roleplay there a LOT more than in Tuluk. So they kind of balance out.

[Sephiroto]

Would the mass of jupiter change enough to de-stabilize our orbit? Do multiple star systems have figure 8 orbits or something... never thought of that before.

Well, yes.  Any time more mass is introduced to a system, the orbits will change.  Whether or not it is noticible, or how noticable that is, depends on the amount of mass added and where it is added (law of inverse squares).

Imagine that everything about or solar system stayed the same, with the exception of Juipter having ~10-12 times its current mass (enough to make it give off light and go nuclear) the orbits of all the planets would now be changed and the sun would wobble.  I'm not doing any calculations (because I'm not -that- educated), but I imagine it to look something like this, which is an example of an earty/moon mass orbiting one another (which might be very similar for a Sun/10x Jupiter mass situation.:

I'm not familiar enough with mathematics to even guess what that would do to the orbits of the other planets.  It is my guess that the outer planets would be drawn closer to the Sun due to the the extra gravitational influence of a larger Juipter inside their orbits.  I'm assuming that it would also cause the orbits of all planets to be far more ellpitical, thus exaggerating our seasons (among other things).

Many binary stars do have figure-eight orbits.  This happens when two objects of nearly the same mass approach one another pass nearby and capture one another, then orbit around a center of mass between them.    Apparently this model is fairly common, but there are many different possibilities for star/planet/sattellite orbits.

[RogueGunslinger]

Awesome!

[Synthesis]

If the soil on Jihae reflects only red wavelengths of light, it will appear red.

If the soil on Lirathu reflects all wavelengths of light, it will appear white.  The color of the sky doesn't really make a difference.  Does the moon on Earth look blue when you can see it during the day because the sky is blue?  Does it darken when the sky darkens?  Does it change colors at sunset?  No:  it's pretty much white every time you see it (unless there's a lunar eclipse, in which case only red wavelengths of light from the Sun are reaching it, meaning that only red wavelengths of light are available to be reflected).

If the black moon reflects no light, it will be black.

The moons aren't "emitting" light.  They're reflecting it (or not) from Suk-krath.

Unless Zalanthan physics are unlike anything we've ever seen, of course.

[Lizzie]

Also, in the world of Zalanthas, it's documented that the sky is red. So, when the black moon is out, it'd be visible as a contrast to the red night's sky. On the other hand, what I'd wonder even more, is how you could see a red moon, against a red sky.

[Sephiroto]

Possible reasons for a red sky:

1. Suk-Krath is a cooler main phase star and glows brightest in the red part of the visible spectrum.  Were this the case, it would also most likely give off more infrared radiation and less UV.

2. The molecular construction of the Zalanthan atmosphere absorbs white light and emits red light photons (unlike Earth's blue light photons) as diffused light.

3. The Zalanthan atmosphere is composed of heavy molecular gasses and very large amounts of red, super-fine dust (silt) or ironoxide is suspended, unable to sink through the abnormally heavy gasses, causing the sky to be blanked with a red haze.  The fact that Zalanthan humanoids and insectoids have denser body construction than Earth creatures might support the idea of a denser atmosphere.

4. The Dragon said "Let the skies be red."  And they were.

Does anyone else have an imaginative speculation?

[Bast]

The chances of life being in able to exist ...let alone planets in a binary star system are pretty much nil...planets that orbit binary systems are usually (from what Nasa says) in close orbit with one of the suns or are pretty far from them both. IE out of the safe zone for forming life. Triple systems are another story..

"Planets require accretion to form, specifically accretion in a protoplanetary disk around a young star. Stars can form from the collapse of a molecular cloud core on their own, however planets can only form in the disk around a star.The main problem with forming planets in multiple star systems is dynamic ejection... stars can simply toss planetesimals out of the system all together (or even accrete them). An example of this is the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt where Jupiter doesn't allow asteroids to exist in certain orbits, and conversely it "shepherds" asteroids in to certain other orbits. A companion star would have a similar effect, except there would be a lot less "shepherding" orbits. The vast majority of binary stars have eccentric orbits. It is difficult for bodies to exist in a system with two very massive bodies in an eccentric orbit. They can only exist very close to each star, or very far from both stars. " -quote via smart people at Nasa

It is possible if you have two of the right kinda stars orbiting each other at exactly the right way but I'm pretty sure the odds of that are very slim.
Personally I just chalk it up to  I'm playing an rpg...Our moon looks white..our sky is blue?  As for the black one that's  whole other can o'worms.

Edit to add something...Also the whole planet may -not- have a red sky. We play in a very small  part of what is likely a much bigger world. The sky may appear red to us because of dust kicked up into the air by the sea of silt. That same dust could be a good reason why its so freaking hot....The rest of world may in fact have perfectly blue clear skies.

[Jenred]

It is possible if you have two of the right kinda stars orbiting each other at exactly the right way but I'm pretty sure the odds of that are very slim.

Odds in astro-... anything are but an oversight.
European Space Agency is estimating that there are over 100,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. So if your odds are 1 in a billion of ANYTHING (life, star clusters, orbit patterns, etc) then there are 100,000 chances. Even conservative claims are around half that number... so 500 billion instead of a trillion.

Let alone when you factor in the entire Universe.

An imperfect estimate of the Universe is 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (70 septillian stars)
A 1 in a billion chance would have 70 billion or 70 trillion (not good with large math) chances.

[Bast]

I'm just saying its far more likely...That Jihae is in fact moon...not a sun..

[Reiteration]

What happens if said binary stars collide?

[racurtne]

What happens if said binary stars collide?

Depends on the mass of the stars. Let me fish a link out for you...

Ugh, it's not coming easily and I have home work to do, but there are a lot of different things that can happen depending on the mass and density of the stars involved. One possibility is a type 1a supernova (with two white dwarfs that momentarily exceed the Chandrasekhar limit). Another is two neutron stars can impact to form a black hole (depending on the total mass left after impact that isn't flung out into space. I believe it has to above 1.3-1.4 solar masses). All of these are accompanied by large releases of energy.

Someone else can probably hunt up better information for you.

[Delstro]

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/061300sci-stars-collisions.html

According to his calculations, over the 10 billion-year lifetime of the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy, there have been at least one million collisions within globular clusters -- or about one every 10,000 years.

Based on the age of the cluster, its surviving stars should have masses of no more than 80 percent of the mass of the Sun; more massive stars should have burnt out.

However, four of the blue stragglers in the cluster were about 1.6 times the mass of the Sun, so they presumably represent the mergers of two stars.

One blue straggler was a whopping 2.4 times heavier -- "so massive that it can't have formed by the merger of two stars," Dr. Saffer said. That straggler, he said, was probably born from a three-star collision, when an outsider star flew into a binary system.

[Sephiroto]

Globular clusters and galaxies, much like atoms, are mostly empty space.  When two of those collide most of the stars pass relatively harmlessly past one another.  What I mean by that, is that there is no head-on collision.  What happens is though, is that the orbits of all the stars, planets, and planetistimals involved are changed.  This could be disasterous for any solar systems containing life because it will probably cause catastrophic effects on the planets themselves, while the stars, for the most part stay intact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOazBTHzRYA  (I'm at work, so I can't watch this.  I think this is the right video.)

Star collisions, at least head-on, don't happen often at all because, even though space is quite large, it is mostly empty.  Instead, generally two massive objects catch one another and begin to orbit (binary stars or stars/blackhole).  Since one object must have a denser gravity field than the other, generally it will acrete mass from the less dense object.  Gravitational pulls this powerful are more likely to rip apart the orbiting objects and cause them to gradually be "eaten" by the larger body bit by bit, rather than them actually "falling in".  Why?  See "conservation of angular momentum."

Collisions are likely to occur when the orbiting masses no longer have the energy to resist the gravitational pull between them and are so dense that they can not be torn apart by gravitational tides.  Then, as Racurtne suggests, they collide to form supernovae, or black holes.  This is because the matter of the white dwarfs and neutron stars have been stripped down (no longer atoms, but elementary particles) and compacted so tight that there is virturally no space between them at all.  A teaspoon of this degenerate matter (electron or neutron soup) might weigh as much as a mountain.

That's sorta what happens at least.  I'm not a scientist...yet.

[Niamh]

I always imagined Jihae to be a different shade of red than the sky.

[FantasyWriter]

Suk-Krath is in the back, Lirathu fore, and Jihae in the top right.
(the colors are relative rather than bleach white and blood red)

[Nyr]

If you accept that Jihae and Lirathu are both moons, then no special scientific or magickal explanation is needed for color.  If you accept that the black moon is also a moon, then no special scientific or magickal explanation is needed for color, but it does present a lot of questions.

Why is the sky blue?  Extrapolate from this as to why the sky is red in Zalanthas.
Why is the moon white while the sun is yellow?  Extrapolate from this as to why Lirathu is white (or Jihae is red).

[perfecto]

Get real people...

Everyone knows that there's only one moon, Lirathu... Jihae and the black one are just Deathstars, waiting, watching.. ready to blow up the world of Zalanthas with a push of a button.

Fluh..

[hyzhenhok]

Suk-Krath is in the back, Lirathu fore, and Jihae in the top right.
(the colors are relative rather than bleach white and blood red)

Every time I saw this before, I figured the big thing rising up the horizon was Suk-krath. Only now do I see the huge motherfucker poking out from behind Lirathu. Sweetness!