The Solar System : How It’s Done

When I first start­ed writ­ing and world-build­ing I had­n’t giv­en any actu­al thought to the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of Par­a­digm — the plan­et’s size, shape, ter­rain, etc. — until ten-ish years into devel­op­ment. For this blog I’m start­ing here because these fea­tures out­line the world nice­ly.

If you’re writ­ing a set­ting for the first time, don’t feel like you need to do the same.

Concept

I’m going to out­line a world I’ve want­ed to build for quite some time now. I need a set­ting to put all of my con­tent in, and to be safe I should prob­a­bly start with out­lin­ing the cos­mic set­ting of my world — the planet.

Wants

Already, I’ve decid­ed the plan­et’s going to be called “Par­a­digm” because I like how the word sounds (and how it’s spelled), and because I like the par­a­digm’s mean­ing:
“a typ­i­cal exam­ple or pat­tern of something”.

I’ve also decid­ed that, like Earth, Par­a­digm is going to be the name of the plan­et “Par­a­digm”.

I’ll need to decide on the plan­et’s fea­tures if I want to set myself up for suc­cess. If I can decide where the moun­tains are now, far­ther down the road a mys­te­ri­ous moun­tain range won’t just spring up from the ground on its own. There are a few I’ve decid­ed on already:

• Par­a­digm is near Earth­’s size, maybe a bit bigger
• It has a moon sim­i­lar in size to itself
• It orbits more than one sun

I don’t know if any or all of these ideas are pos­si­ble, but it’s a start­ing point.

Hurdles

The name “Par­a­digm” and what it means could be an issue down the road
(see Works-In-Progress), but that’s fine for now. The name also sounds a bit pre­ten­tious, so I’ll need to decide if that both­ers me enough to change it.

I’m think­ing now that if I have to define the plan­et, I’m going to need to define the solar sys­tem it exists in — if it has moon(s), sun(s), and oth­er things that peo­ple would see in the night (or day) sky. I start­ed out titling this post “Par­a­digm the Plan­et” but I’m going to need to expand this piece to include Par­a­dig­m’s greater solar system.

Connections

Since this is my first post, I don’t have any oth­er con­tent to link here yet.

The Process

1. Get Your Bear­ings. I have to make an entire solar sys­tem now, so I should review what I have: 

• a plan­et named Paradigm
• some amount of things in space (rel­a­tive­ly) close to the planet

Let me go dou­ble-check Wikipedia to see if I’m miss­ing anything.

Turns out a solar sys­tem is called a plan­e­tary sys­tem, and a planet(s) orbit a star sys­tem. A bit more research lat­er, and it turns out that types of plan­e­tary sys­tems and star sys­tems vary a lot in the observ­able uni­verse. I found some­thing called a bina­ry star sys­tem — when the cen­ter star in a star sys­tem is actu­al­ly a pair (bina­ry) of stars rotat­ing about one anoth­er. It looks pret­ty cool. So I’m going to use it as a base for the Par­a­dig­mi­an system.

2. Decide on the Star Sys­tem. Mul­ti­ple-star sys­tems are real­ly cool. Though I had cho­sen a bina­ry star sys­tem (2 stars), triple-star sys­tems are also neat, and Wikipedia even has a few exam­ples. I’m going to revise my pre­vi­ous idea: Par­a­digm now has three suns. For ref­er­ence, our solar sys­tem is a sin­gle-star system.

I hon­est­ly know very lit­tle about astro­physics and space oth­er than that it’s pret­ty. I have ideas (Wants) but I’m not sure if I can fit all the pieces togeth­er in a way that’s even phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. But even before that I think I’m going to run into a prob­lem here:

I want a bina­ry star sys­tem with a plan­et and a moon and peo­ple in that solar sys­tem. But can it even sup­port life?

3. Hab­it­abil­i­ty Zones. In order to sus­tain life as we know it, a plan­et needs a lot of things to come togeth­er in the same place. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few neces­si­ties of life:

• Resources and atom­ic elements
• Water
• An atmos­phere

The water and atmos­phere are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, rel­a­tive to the star a plan­et orbits. If the plan­et is too far from its star the water on its sur­face freezes com­plete­ly; too close, and the stel­lar heat burns every­thing up includ­ing the atmosphere.

Sci­en­tists have cal­cu­lat­ed that space between burn­ing up and freez­ing: the first cri­te­ria for a plan­et to con­tain life is that it sits inside a sweet spot called the cir­cum­stel­lar hab­it­able zone (CHZ). Skim­ming Wikipedia, I real­ize these astro­physics are incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed. I have absolute­ly no idea how to fig­ure any of this out, so I’ll scour the inter­net a bit and see what turns up.

(There’s actu­al­ly a real­ly neat bit of math called the Drake equa­tion that lays out the prob­a­bil­i­ty of life [as an advanced civ­i­liza­tion] exist­ing on a planet.)

There’s a lot to look at, so I backed my research up a lit­tle bit and dug more into bina­ry star sys­tems. On YouTube I found a video on how to build a bina­ry-star-orbit­ing plan­et by a YouTu­ber called Artifex­i­an.

Artifex­i­an is one of the best world­build­ing resources I’ve found,
and I use his work often; please sup­port his chan­nel.

I don’t know how to build a star, as Artifex­i­an instructs, so I’ll have to start at the begin­ning of his star-build­ing series.

This is going to take sev­er­al days at the very least –

4. Take a Break As Needed.

5. (2.) Decide on the Sys­tem (Again). Thanks to Artifex­i­an I’m learn­ing, among oth­er things, that there already exists a star sys­tem with four suns and one plan­et. This is use­ful to me: that sys­tem has two bina­ry star sys­tems orbit­ing around one anoth­er, with a plan­et thrown into the mix.

In astro­physics, each bina­ry star (pair of 2 stars) is math­e­mat­i­cal­ly treat­ed as one star. If I have one huge star and a bina­ry sys­tem of two oth­er stars, a three-star sys­tem should work (1 + 2 = 3). I also found more evi­dence of bina­ry stars that can sup­port hab­it­able plan­ets. It’s look­ing good for my three-sun world.

6. See Where You’re At. This post has tak­en far longer than I expect­ed — a few days on the research alone. Below, I’m going to lay out what I have so far. Next post will be (hope­ful­ly) wrap­ping these space-physcs up enough so I can move on:

• Par­a­digm orbits more than one sun: three suns
• It is near Earth­’s size, maybe a bit bigger
• It has a moon sim­i­lar in size to itself

Works-In-Progress

(This entire post;)

Some­thing I want to con­sid­er far­ther down the road is the name “Par­a­digm”. In our real­i­ty, we Eng­lish speak­ers call the plan­et we live on “Earth”. We also use the word “earth” for the ground earth we walk on and as a syn­onym for dirt. This invokes a rel­e­vant ques­tion: “does the word earth exist in Paradigm?”

For now, prob­a­bly not.