#2575: Taking reality and making it my bitch!
I'm working on one of my SF novels, and just discovered Regulus is egg-shaped.
Well, this news is 6 years old, and I only happened to find it by accident; but I'm incorporating it into the story I'm working on, and I'll fit it into the others going forward. This news doesn't nullify my work, though it does mean I have to throw out the "artistic license" flag a little sooner than I'd hoped to.
See, in my stories, there's a habitable planet circling Regulus. As a B7 class star, Regulus puts out a shitton of UV and x-rays--any planet with a breathable atmosphere will filter out the x-rays, but air is largely transparent to UV. Standing outside in the sun would be fatal; five minutes would kill you. The sunlight would look like a welding arc, too.
I fixed this by putting a dust ring a ways inside that planet's orbit. The planet has to orbit around 11 astronomical units from Regulus anyway, so there's plenty of room.
Problem: if they can image Regulus as well as the image accompanying that article would suggest, they'd be able to see a dust ring were one really there. Hence "artistic license". I'm going to have to claim that a lot more when they find out that the stars I used for my colony worlds don't have the right kind of planets around them....
*sigh* That's the life of an SF writer, though.
Anyway, I took the bulging star and made it a freakin' plot point! Now it turns out that if the star wasn't spinning that fast--and thus wasn't flattened--the dust ring wouldn't occlude enough of the star to keep its UV from frying the planet.
Ha!
History of the star name, etc.
Wikipedia entry on Regulus.
Well, this news is 6 years old, and I only happened to find it by accident; but I'm incorporating it into the story I'm working on, and I'll fit it into the others going forward. This news doesn't nullify my work, though it does mean I have to throw out the "artistic license" flag a little sooner than I'd hoped to.
See, in my stories, there's a habitable planet circling Regulus. As a B7 class star, Regulus puts out a shitton of UV and x-rays--any planet with a breathable atmosphere will filter out the x-rays, but air is largely transparent to UV. Standing outside in the sun would be fatal; five minutes would kill you. The sunlight would look like a welding arc, too.
I fixed this by putting a dust ring a ways inside that planet's orbit. The planet has to orbit around 11 astronomical units from Regulus anyway, so there's plenty of room.
Problem: if they can image Regulus as well as the image accompanying that article would suggest, they'd be able to see a dust ring were one really there. Hence "artistic license". I'm going to have to claim that a lot more when they find out that the stars I used for my colony worlds don't have the right kind of planets around them....
*sigh* That's the life of an SF writer, though.
Anyway, I took the bulging star and made it a freakin' plot point! Now it turns out that if the star wasn't spinning that fast--and thus wasn't flattened--the dust ring wouldn't occlude enough of the star to keep its UV from frying the planet.
Ha!
History of the star name, etc.
Wikipedia entry on Regulus.
