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I'm making a worldbuilding project mainly focussed arround an habitable planet that orbits a binary system and I have a question about my system.

My planetary system is an S-type (A main star in the center of the system and the other star orbiting the main star like the rest of the planets.) composed on a 0.59 Solar mass K6.6V star (It's called Stiarna) and a 62.3 Jupiter mass L-type brown dwarf (Valr). Just to clarify things the main star is Stiarna and the secondary is Valr, they orbit at a distance of 0.45 AU. And in the secondary star there's a planet orbiting it called Liva orbiting it at a distance of 0.054 AU.

I want to know if Liva can be stable in that kind of orbit and if it will be tidally locked to Valr or escape tidal locking due to the proximity between Stiarna and Valr, Liva besides having a low eccentricity it has several moons but they're mostly like Mars moons so they don't affect too much the orbit. There's a terrestrial planet with 2.7 earth masses orbiting at 0.09 AU, a carbon planet (it comes from Valr) that has 1.5-2.3 Earth masses at 0.8 AU and a Super-Neptune of 29 earth masses orbiting at 5.8 AU. I don't think they affect too much on the stability but I include them if anyone needs the data of the other planets for the answer.

Thanks for taking your time to read it.

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  • $\begingroup$ Please edit the question to limit it to a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer. $\endgroup$ Commented May 20, 2024 at 10:46
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  • $\begingroup$ Alright I'll do one question but what about the other posts? There's multiple posts with more than one question and I haven't seen a moderator saying that policy. $\endgroup$ Commented May 20, 2024 at 10:57
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TL;DR: Liva is probably in a stable orbit, and is almost certainly tidally locked.


Important thing 1 is the Hill Sphere. The Hill radius of a body is given by $$ r_H \approx a\sqrt[3]{m \over 3M} $$ where $r_H$ is the Hill radius, $m$ is the mass of the orbiting body, $M$ is the mass of the orbited body and $a$ is the radius of the orbit (I'm assuming everything is circular, for convenience).

The Hill radius of Valr is ~0.145 AU. That's about 2.7x the orbital radius of Liva. Orbits appear to be stable over the long term only for things within about 1/2 to 1/3 of their parent body's Hill radius. Liva is perhaps a little further out than is ideal, but it isn't obviously in immediate peril.

Important thing 2 is tidal locking, which is extremely fiddly to compute.

The time for a body to become tidally locked can be approximated by $$T_{lock} \approx {\omega a^6 I Q \over 3Gm_p^2 k_2 r^5}$$ where $\omega$ is Liva's spin rate, $a$ its orbital semimajor axis, $I$ is the moment of inertia, $Q$ is the dissipation function, $G$ is the gravitational constant, $m_p$ is the mass of Valr, $k_2$ is the Love number of the Liva and $r$ is its radius.

Using earthlike values for the parameters you haven't provided: $\omega$ as 2π rad/day, $I$ as 0.331 x the mass of the Earth x the radius of the Earth squared, Q appears to be about 100 and $k_2$ appears to be about 0.308 I get a tidal locking timescale on the order of half a billion years which is a blink of an eye by astronomical standards. Obviously, this is an approximation and shouldn't be taken as a literal countdown time, but you should assume that Liva is tidally locked to Valr.

The proximity of Stiarna may or may not be relevant. The sheer mass of Valr and its fluid nature means it is probably quite resistant to tidal locking, so you don't have to worry about its moons being flung off into space.

The strength of tidal forces looks a bit like $F_T \propto {M \over d^3}$, or, the strength of the tidal force is proportional to the mass of the body generating the tides and inversely proportional to the cube of the separation of the affected body from the affecting body. Stiarna will have a stronger affect on Liva than the Sun does on Earth... $.59 \over .45^3$ or ~6.45 times stronger. I'm not sure how this will manifest, but it is possible that Liva might be subject to tidal ejection as the effects of Stiarna's gravity slow and widen its orbit until it falls out of Valr's Hill sphere. See Ploonets: formation, evolution, and detectability of tidally detached exomoons. Liva might be OK, as the authors suggest that moons within half of the planet's Hill radius may remain attached to their parent.

Liva besides having a low eccentricity it has several moons but they're mostly like Mars moons

Liva's Hill radius is small (only a little over 200000km if it were Earth-mass) and it is tidally locked to its parent which is problematic for long-term stability of its moons. They might have been captured asteroids, or maybe ejecta from a big collision, but they probably won't have formed at the same time as Liva itself and they probably won't hang around for long. Still, tens or hundreds of millions of years seem like they might be possible.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for taking your time to answer my question and to answer that haha. Sorry for not providing the parameters of Liva but the planet is a little bit bigger than Earth. Today I simulated it on universe sandbox 2 but even if I make it tidally locked it isn't wich is strange, I was mostly concerned that the interaction between the two stars ejected Liva. $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 5, 2024 at 16:57

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