• Question: if you were to design a planet what colour, shape......... would it be and why?

    Asked by littlechatterbox to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      There’s a lot of work that goes into designing a planet, you have to decide what size it is, what its’s made of (gas or rock) what its atmosphere is made of and if it has life on it.

      I think it would be really cool to have a gas planet where the atmosphere is thick enough for people to fly around with thin wings, and all the cities would be floating round in the sky. Purple would be a great colour for sunsets, so you’d have to have iodine in the atmosphere!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I would probably make a ringworld, because they’re awesome! (And got copied by the people that made Halo)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

      Or maybe a dyson sphere, the most efficient type of planet (kind of!)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I once answered a question about weather on a cubical planet (I used to do this a lot when I was a PhD student for something called Curious? Ask an Astronomer: here’s my answer from then: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=421). it’s not really possible because gravity would make it round, but if you could it would be fun to have a cubical planet.

      Otherwise I choose the discworld (Terry Pratchett) complete with elephants and turtles. I can do anything I like right?

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      That is a question that needs lots of thought. They have to be round, because gravity will slowly turn them that shape anyway so we may as well start with it. I’m not sure about colour but I do like orange, so a bit like Jupiter so far. Clouds make it nice, so they ought to be white in colour. There was an interesting novel I read where there were huge animals that floated about in the atmosphere and people lived inside of them. I suppose I would like to have somewhere interesting to land so I would have a surface, but Titan has interesting lakes made of methane so perhaps black seas that you could walk/sail on.

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