Sci Fi and Fantasy Q & A Jan 31, 2005

Hi everybody. I just have one question to answer this time around, so thanks to SherrasQ for breaking the ice.

Please fell free to email me with your questions about writing science fiction and fantasy for the end of next month. Trust me when I say that if you are wondering about something, there are other people out there asking the exact same questions. Also, if you have an excerpt from whatever you are working on that you would like reviewed, and you don't mind me making that review public, send it on.

Now for the questions:

How much research do you do in geology and the formation of planets and stars
when you begin a story? Especially when the discoveries today completely
contradict what has been learned thus far?

Even though an astrophysics degree is not required to write science fiction (thank goodness), I think it is very important to make sure that the planetary systems and worlds that you are creating are at least plausible.

For example, you would not find an earth-like planet orbiting a red giant at the same orbit as our earth. (1 AU) When our sun goes into the red giant stage, it will eat up everything at least as far as earth's orbit.

There are fascinating new theories as to how planet's develop within a baby solar system. Until very recently, it had been thought that all the planets around a sun were created as a result of matter slamming into one another until the planetesimals were large enough to have gravity. After that stage, matter would be pulled in to form the rest of the planet.

Although scientists think that this accreation theory may still hold true for the inner planets -- Maercury, Venus, Earth and Mars -- several recent discoveries have scientists coming up with new theories as to the origins of the outer planets.

The discovery of Jupiter sized planets in close orbit around other stars**, the discovery of the "Methuselah" planet in the globular cluster M4*, and the presence of higher than expected levels of the noble gases (argon, krypton, and xenon) in Jupiter's atmosphere** have raised theories that planets seem to be created faster than previously thought and perhaps in a cooler environment than scientists once believed.(*1, **2)

What does all this have to do with your sci fi story? Everything if you are creating your own solar systems. It is vitally important that you do your research into what sorts of planets orbit around different stars, and how life would be affected by both planet and star.

In order to convince our readers to suspend their disbelief and go along with the invented science in our work, we need to have a solid base of what is known.

The information I presented in answering this question comes from:

1)Ancient planet discovery challenges planet-formation ideas
11 July 2003
NewScientist.com news service
David L. Chandler
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3932&print=true

2)Jupiter's Composition Throws Planet-formation Theories into Disarray
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
17 November 1999
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/jupiter_elements_991117.html