Recent content by Thorsten

  1. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    Yes, there is - in winter the stratosphere moves down somewhat, although it still ends up being much higher than Earth (the hard photon flux is down by a factor 5 or so, but given that the density drops exponentially with altitude, that's not dramatic for things like O3 production rate).
  2. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    The version 0.5 is now also out - with nice toys for looking into atmosphere structure: Here is a case study of Brian Aldiss' Helliconia, a world that orbits its small sun Batalix while both in turn orbit hot and luminous Freyr,, leading to a summer at Freyr periapsis and a winter at apoapsis...
  3. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    I'm kind of limited by what the MPI UV/Vis spectral atlas offers in terms of cross sections... but yeah, there are quite a few lineshapes available. As far as O2 is concerned, I agree - Earth history shows how heavily biosphere driven it is. However, it's much more interesting to simulate a...
  4. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    Here's some work in progress - the Chapman mechanism (UV light dissolves O2 -> O+O, part of that forms ozone, ozone has a strong absorption cross section at longer wavelength UV and leads to a pronounced heating of the upper atmosphere, giving rise to the temperature increase in the...
  5. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    I'm happy to announce the version 0.4 of the simulation tool which now can do some stuff on atmosphere and hydrosphere transport and has a simple weather and climate code for Earth-like worlds (there's more to come, but it's already fun to play with what is there). Here's a quick view on...
  6. Thorsten

    The Physics of Sunsets

    If anyone is interested, the article is now finished with the discussion of a few exotic phenomena - light scattering on ice crystals for instance, or the question of green sunsets.
  7. Thorsten

    The Physics of Sunsets

    That's kind of the point of the project - to illustrate what matters how. As you'll figure out quickly when you actually try this - a bare atmosphere is easy to compute (that works with decent accuracy even in real time). The reason is that you can see through the atmosphere, it is optically...
  8. Thorsten

    The Physics of Sunsets

    I've long been interested in light passing through the atmosphere, particularly in sunsets. Initially this came from implementing low light halfway correctly in real time 3d rendering, but I've quickly discovered that many multiple scattering processes are simply too complex to include in a fast...
  9. Thorsten

    Making Movies

    For those following the Cliodhna-series, here is our episode 8 'The Raven' Enjoy!
  10. Thorsten

    Making Movies

    A new episode of the mini-series 'A Sword and his Hero' - this time the Sword learns about the simple pleasures of human(oid) life:
  11. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    I'm happy to announce the version 0.3 which now includes support for some of the issues we had discussed. In particular, it is now possible to set up the simulation of gas giant moons - here is an example of temperatures on Io This includes the (optional) effect of eclipses and reflected and...
  12. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    It's charming in a way, but... Are you by any chance confusing my hobby with an NSF grant review? I don't propose to provide a tool to simulate 'most' 'interesting' exoplanets (as for 'most', since finding them is significantly biased by the finding methods which prefer large and heavy...
  13. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    Those would be most conveniently specified as 'at L4 (or L5)' and placed using a Lagrange point finder (surprise, I have one of those as well...) I've never heard that you can have planets developing there though... it seems kinda hard to accumulate enough mass, usually it's just debris that's...
  14. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    Not upon init, but you can run the orbital solver to get to your point of interest and then start the thermal solver on top. No. I know they're interesting for habitability by e.g. stabilizing the rotation axis, but that's a long-term stability thing and outside of the scope of the program -...
  15. Thorsten

    Fictional Exoplanet creation

    Okay, I managed to get the update out - this can now also do planets orbiting binary stars. Here's an example from 'Helliconia', a novel series by Brian Aldiss. Helliconia orbits sun-like Batalix which in turn orbits Freyr on an elliptical orbit with an eccentricity of 0.5 - at periapsis Freyr...
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