Celestia Forums

When celestia calculate temperatures for bodies does it just take into account the distance from the star and albedo or does it also take into account tidal heating, green house effect for planets with an atmosphere? and i know it does not take into account radiactive decay heating.

The temperature of an object in Celestia is dependent only on Albedo and the star's luminosity and distance.

If you take a look at the properties in the SSC files, you can see there is no way to specify the relevant parameters for the additional effects you describe.

yes you are right, the effect can be seen on Io whose temperature in celestia id 98 K but in reality its 130 K to 200k, So yes no tidal heating yet.

So what are the odds of Celestia handling tidal heating?

What all does tidal heating depend on? And can it be approximated in Celestia?
So far, the only things I can think of are rotation period of the planet/moon, mass and distance of the body being orbited, the mass of both objects, the density of the planet/moon (this can probably just be calculated with just mass and radius), and the proximity and gravities of nearby objects orbiting around the same body. Of course, I don't quite understand tidal heating too well, so please, feel free to comment on this.

Some of the .ssc files, the extrasolar.ssc being the only one I can think of, has a "mass" attribute in it. As far as I know, it does nothing.

You also need to add in parameters to do with the internal structure: things are going to be very different for a gas giant which is mainly fluid, or a "cold" terrestrial which is solid the whole way through, or a terrestrial planet with molten layers... and then you have to take into account how the materials behave: rock is less easily deformed than ice for example, so composition is relevant.

In fact, the relevant parameters for tidal equations are generally known extremely poorly for real planets.

Hungry4info wrote:So what are the odds of Celestia handling tidal heating?

The odds are very close to zero that Celestia would handle this. The modeling of tidal heating is very complex and well outside the scope of Celestia. I think it's important to maintain Celestia's focus on visualization and not stray into modeling--gravitational interactions, tidal heating, weather modeling, etc. can all done with software specialized for those purposes.

--Chris