Celestia Forums

This is an interesting scenario. Lets just say that there are THREE gravitational fields in a tight cluster. Could a planet or planetoid form in this in this cluster, more importantly can a star? Im not expecting you know, unless some of you are gods, but I want a general possibility. I am molding the home worlds of the three insectoid species that form the space pirates.

Depends on what you mean by tight, among other things.

tight as in, 2/3 of the distance from the earth to the moon.

Not at that scale. 2/3 of the distance from the Earth to the Moon is only 256,000 km. That is a bit more than a third of the Sun's radius. That is not to say you couldn't have three Earth sized white dwarves in that volume, but it would be very unlikely from what I understand. From what I know, trinary systems are inherently unstable. One of the members usually gets ejected out. There are some binary systems that could fit within the volume of our Sun.

Ok, we've ruled out the trianry system, how about, instead of stars, planets the size of mars? heh, it rhymes.

Too unstable.

You could check out Gravity Simulator to test whether your scenarios are stable. It won't tell you whether objects will form in certain regions, but you should be able to eliminate unstable end-configurations.

Thanks, that can help with my many 'unusual' systems.