Posted by: Cocyte
« on: April 23, 2012, 07:40:31 PM »Except that if you take "real stars" option a good chunk if not most of the stars will be red dwarfs. Which means your gas giants will be located 10-50 million kilometres from the star. In that case 2-4 million kilometres change is quite big. Plus, while it's true that Earth perihelion and aphelion are further apart, in the case of the gas giants the change is more quicker. The Eart have enitre year of journey between close and far point, the sattelites would have changes occuring on a monthly basis (or 2-3 months, depends on orbit). I assume such a more sudden change would have consequences, perhaps serious, for the weather patterns. Of course I might be wrong too.
Ah, red dwarfs, those "runts" are indeed a weird case...
Just made the computation for Barnard's star and a jovian sized compagnon lurking at 15Mkm... Its hill sphere have a radius of less than 1mKm... A satellite at this distance would have quite a variable weather during it's 6 days orbit around the planet
However, life (as we know it) would be quite difficult around Barnard's star because it is, like a lot of those red dwarfs, a flare star, releasing sometime some massive radiation bursts...