Hypothetical Bodies

[PlutonianEmpire]

Ja thank you, SpaceFanatic! And glad you like my Del Tri Addon!

[SevenSpheres]

Hey PlutonianEmpire, are you still using Celestia, or just SpaceEngine now?

[PlutonianEmpire]

I have 1.6.1 still installed, but mainly use it when porting my old Celestia mods to Space Engine, or to look up a historical planetary positions. I dont know if the newer ones still have it, but I really like the ability to go 2 Gy forward or backwards in time. I know I made a historical continental drift mod for Earth, using the special timeline features. I also made a formation scenario involving Delta Trianguli using the timeline features as well

Only annoying thing is that because my laptop's gpu is a potato, setting stars to points in Celestia 1.6.1 turns them into flickering squares.

Right now my main program of choice is Space Engine at the moment

[SevenSpheres]

I know I made a historical continental drift mod for Earth, using the special timeline features.

What textures did you use? All the paleogeography maps I've seen are low resolution and/or aren't what Earth would actually look like from space.

setting stars to points in Celestia 1.6.1 turns them into flickering squares.

This has been fixed in the current Celestia 1.7 builds.

[Joey P.]

Why don't we try adding all of the hypothesized trans-Neptunian planets?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hypothetical_Solar_System_objects

Added after 4 minutes 17 seconds:
Here is a list of the planets of our early Solar System (including a hypothetical, disputed one):

1. Vulcan (Super-Earth)
2. Caloris Basin impactor (collided with Mercury)
3. Mercury
4. Venus
5. Earth
6. Mars
7. Planet V (collided with Mars)
8. Phaeton (shattered to form Asteroid Belt)
9. Theia (collided with Earth)
10. Jupiter
11. Saturn
12. Ghost Zone (Planet Nine)
13. Vortex (Nice model planet #5)
14. Neptune
15. Uranus
16. Gna (detected in 2015; disputed)
17. Triton (captured by Neptune)
18. Pluto
19. 15760 Albion (planetesimal)
20. 1993 FW (planetesimal)
21. Minerva (Planet Ten)

plus everything else:
22. Oceanus
23. Hyperion
24. Thomas Jackson Jefferson See planet #2 (Persephone?)
25. Thomas Jackson Jefferson See planet #3 (Caina?)

Added after 11 minutes 40 seconds:
I've heard that Larry Niven's *fictional* novel The Borderland of Sol mentions various trans-Neptunian planets, as well as having demoted Pluto due to it being suspected of being an escaped Neptunian satellite. The planets are Persephone, Caina, Antenora, and Ptolomea, after the innermost rounds of Dante's Inferno.

[PlutonianEmpire]

There's also a series of hypothetical "Uranian" planets beyond Pluto:

Cupido
Hades
Zeus
Kronos
Apollon
Admetos
Vulcanus (Not to be confused with Vulcan the intra-Mercurial)
Poseidon


The Textures I used for my prehistory timeline are also low resolution, at 1024x512 unfortunately.

Good to know about the fix!

[Joey P.]

PlutonianEmpire wrote:

There's also a series of hypothetical "Uranian" planets beyond Pluto:

Cupido
Hades
Zeus
Kronos
Apollon
Admetos
Vulcanus (Not to be confused with Vulcan the intra-Mercurial)
Poseidon

Where are the sources for those?

Added after 5 minutes 47 seconds:
Also, back to Phaeton, if you ask me, personally I think it should have a goddess's name or a feminine one, because the names of the first twenty asteroids are from feminine figures. I'm looking at "Astraea" for the following reasons:
* Her name and the term "asteroid" share a nearly identical terminology - asteroid translates to "star-like" while Astraea means "star-maiden".
* She was the sister of the Wandering Stars (Stilbon, Hesperus, Pyroeis, Phaethon, and Phainon) before they were conflated with the Olympian Gods and their Roman counterparts.
* This fringe theory refers to Phaeton as "Astra", a diminutive of Astraea: http://www.thule.org/mars/index.html

Astraea, however, has no Roman counterpart. Though she also represents the constellation Virgo and is a justice goddess, with the Roman Justitia also representing Virgo and alluding to justice, Justitia is barely referred to as Astraea's Roman counterpart. Justitia is more likely a personification with Astraea being a "legitimate" goddess, and they likely have different origins before the two were conflated.

[fyr02]

Astraea is already the name for an asteroid (5 Astraea)

[Joey P.]

I knew that. But I don't think it matters if a planet and one of its fragments have the same name. After all, nearly everyone can tell the difference between an Earth-like, habitable super-Earth and a barren, rocky small asteroid.

Added after 7 minutes 17 seconds:
There are now also "Oreon" and "Terminus", which shattered to form the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud (not including Pluto and Charon but including Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna): http://www.ldolphin.org/unruh/planet/ch3ph.html

James P. Hogan's novel Inherit the Stars does, however, refer to Pluto as a fragment of Phaeton (err, I mean, Astraea).

[fyr02]

I don't think that is a very reliable source but ok

[Joey P.]

Edit: I've added the fictional outer planets from The Borderland of Sol to my Celestia:

Caina: blue
Antenora: green
Ptolomea: cyan (old "gasgiant" texture)

And to be fair, I am in favor of the names (though I prefer that they be used for any future outer planets discovered other than Planet Nine and Planet Ten, which I want to be called Ghost Zone and Minerva respectively) and find them quite fitting. In their original source (Dante's Inferno), they are the innermost rounds of a frozen torture lake underground, which very much resembles the surface of most, if not all, dwarf planets and objects this far away from the Sun.

Update: Here is the .ssc file for these planets, including Judecca (not a planet in the book but rather the name reserved for a future discovery). It also gives the correct inclination for Persephone.

Code: Select all

"Persephone" "Sol"
{
   Texture "exo-class4.*"
   # Color [ 0.75 0.75 1.0 ]
   Radius 10000

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Period           100000
      SemiMajorAxis     525
      Eccentricity      0.01
      Inclination       120
      AscendingNode   100.556
      ArgOfPericenter  74.043
           MeanLongitude    34.404
   }

   BodyFrame { EclipticJ2000 {} }
   UniformRotation
   {
   Period           9.927953   
   # Period        9.92491250 
   Inclination     2.22
   AscendingNode 337.80
   MeridianAngle 334       
                            
   # MeridianAngle   305.38
   
   }   

   Albedo 0.51
}

"Caina" "Sol"
{
   Texture "neptune-like.*"
   # Color [ 0.75 0.75 1.0 ]
   Radius 9500

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Period           100000
      SemiMajorAxis     550
      Eccentricity      0.01
      Inclination       20
      AscendingNode   100.556
      ArgOfPericenter  74.043
           MeanLongitude    34.404
   }

   BodyFrame { EclipticJ2000 {} }
   UniformRotation
   {
   Period           9.927953   
   # Period        9.92491250 
   Inclination     2.22
   AscendingNode 337.80
   MeridianAngle 334       
                            
   # MeridianAngle   305.38
   
   }   

   Albedo 0.51
}

"Antenora" "Sol"
{
   Texture "exo-class5.*"
   # Color [ 0.75 0.75 1.0 ]
   Radius 8520

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Period           100000
      SemiMajorAxis     630
      Eccentricity      0.01
      Inclination       20
      AscendingNode   100.556
      ArgOfPericenter  74.043
           MeanLongitude    34.404
   }

   BodyFrame { EclipticJ2000 {} }
   UniformRotation
   {
   Period           9.927953   
   # Period        9.92491250 
   Inclination     2.22
   AscendingNode 337.80
   MeridianAngle 334       
                            
   # MeridianAngle   305.38
   
   }   

   Albedo 0.51
}

"Ptolomea" "Sol"
{
   Texture "gasgiant.*"
   Radius 8925

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Period           100000
      SemiMajorAxis     700
      Eccentricity      0.01
      Inclination       20
      AscendingNode   100.556
      ArgOfPericenter  74.043
           MeanLongitude    34.404
   }

   BodyFrame { EclipticJ2000 {} }
   UniformRotation
   {
   Period           9.927953   
   # Period        9.92491250 
   Inclination     2.22
   AscendingNode 337.80
   MeridianAngle 334       
                            
   # MeridianAngle   305.38
   
   }   

   Albedo 0.51
}

"Judecca" "Sol"
{
   Texture "Quark-night.*"
   Radius 8925

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
      Period           100000
      SemiMajorAxis     750
      Eccentricity      0.01
      Inclination       20
      AscendingNode   100.556
      ArgOfPericenter  74.043
           MeanLongitude    34.404
   }

   Atmosphere {
      Height 77
      Lower [ 0.21 0.52 0.65 ]
      Upper [ 0.23 0.47 0.84 ]
      Sky [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
   }

   BodyFrame { EclipticJ2000 {} }
   UniformRotation
   {
   Period           9.927953   
   # Period        9.92491250 
   Inclination     2.22
   AscendingNode 337.80
   MeridianAngle 334       
                            
   # MeridianAngle   305.38
   
   }   

   Albedo 0.51
}


[Joey P.]

You've spelt "Vulcanoid" wrong in the latest addon version!

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

Update: Vulcanoid spelling correction.

[Joey P.]

You're welcome.

[Joey P.]

Update (actually from 2016): A study suggests that the reason why vulcanoids don't exist is that a super-Earth that orbited the Sun even closer than Mercury (super-Earths orbiting their parent suns closer than Mercury to our own is common for Sun-like stars) cleared its neighborhood before plunging into the Sun because of its gravity. Perhaps this is Vulcan?
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-sun-eaten-super-earth-breakfast.html

Added after 20 hours 17 minutes:
Back to Phaeton:
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wix ... DlO_Q6uAe4BZ3XeedUyBuwliDxacio

Added after 2 days:
I would also suggest the name "Vortex" for the hypothetical ejected fifth giant, after the ghost with weather-like powers in the Danny Phantom episode "Torrent of Terror". After all, Neptune is the Roman god of the sea and storms, and Uranus is the primordial Greek sky god.

Added after 1 hour 55 minutes:
Here's my version of Anthony's addon, including a super-Earth Vulcan and other proposed moons. The bodies (except the trans-Neptunian one) are classified as dwarf planets to avoid conflicts with the existing planets and their order.

Hypotheticals.zip

(1.82 MiB) Downloaded 258 times

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

Major update, thanks to Gurren Lagann suggestion, Planet 9 now has a set of outer moons orbiting up to 8.5 AU. Most of the outer moons are named after Japanese deities, the last 16 moons are named after Celestia users:
Lafuente_Astronomy
FarGetaNik
Sirius_Alpha
Selden
Onetwothree
Vision
SevenSpheres
Art_Blos
Askaniy
Pirogronian
MrSpace-43
Fyr02
Gurren Lagann
The Astronomer
PlutonianEmpire
Anthony_B_Russo10

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

Major update, thanks to Gurren Lagann suggestion, Planet 9 now has a set of outer moons orbiting up to 8.5 AU. Most of the outer moons are named after Japanese deities, the last 16 moons are named after Celestia users:
Lafuente_Astronomy
FarGetaNik
Sirius_Alpha
Selden
Onetwothree
Vision
SevenSpheres
Art_Blos
Askaniy
Pirogronian
MrSpace-43
Fyr02
Gurren Lagann
The Astronomer
PlutonianEmpire
Anthony_B_Russo10

That's a very nice tribute you made there. Thanks!

[Joey P.]

I would name one of the moons "Klemper" after that friendly ghoul from Danny Phantom.

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

You're welcome Lafuente_Astronomy.

[The Minmus Derp]

Oh my god this is fantastic!

It would be really awesome to have a bit of this addon that added all of the dwarf planets that were used to hypothesize planet 9, as well.