Food for thought

[Kumakunshu]

Ran across this little snippet and thought some of you might fined it interesting.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/forget-earth-like-we-ll-first-find-aliens-on-eyeball-planets?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[Vandervecken]

Yes, gonna be a interesting decade for advances if life exploration; both in this system and for signs in other systems. Thanks for the share !

[Cralis]

I actually was thinking about posting that... they keep changing the name of these terminator-habitable planets for one. We don't even know for sure if they can actually exist like they are speculating.

The only new concept for me was how this would affect a world with a lot of water. I hadn't considered if a world had a lot of water and became tidelocked, how would it affect it? If it's too close, the water will boil away. If it's too far away, it will ice over. But my bigger question would be "how did it get all that water in the first place?" Unless it collected a lot of water and then spiraled inward, I'd really wonder if it could have collected enough water to overcome the tide-locked hot side when forming.

Those questions aside, it would be interesting to see a world where the water was hot on the star-facing side, habitable around the edges before becoming ice. Especially because there's a real possibility that deep undersea volcanism will cause heating from below, potentially making the water warm enough under the ice.

It will be interesting to see if there are many terminator-habitable worlds. Once we can detect them...

[voidstalker[woe]]

I wonder how the air currents/weather patterns would take shape on such a world. Hot air rises, and that around the ring easily moves to the dark side and cools off, but what about the hot air near to 'pupil of the eye'? How does that migrate to the dark side? Would the upper atmosphere be moving away from the sun side, while the lower/cooler air (down near the surface) be constantly blowing from the dark side toward the sunside? Or would we still see something like 'trade winds' in effect even without a fast rotation?

[Cralis]

I’m guessing that the air on the hot side rises, pulling air from the cold side. Thinking about it, I wonder if the terminator would be windy and constantly have storms.

[krenshala]

Honestly, the concept makes me thing of the "hurricanes" (for lack of a better name) mentioned in Ringworld Engineers (if I'm remembering which book it was correctly). Instead of coriolis having the winds rotate parallel with the surface, it would be rolling as if it was a wheel on the surface, and the hollow "eye" through the storm would be parallel (instead of the perpendicular we are used to seeing).

[Whitecold]

I’m guessing that the air on the hot side rises, pulling air from the cold side. Thinking about it, I wonder if the terminator would be windy and constantly have storms.

https://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdo ... /eso1629g/
I found these temperature simulations for Proxima B, which while probably not habitable due to radiation trouble, the temperature gradient does not seem excessive compared to what we have between arctic and the equator.
Similar planets (without a freaking flare star to sterilize the surface) could be quite hospitable candidates.