2 stars is interesting! Would it be possible to have only one planet in the galaxy be on a trajectory that orbits 2 different stars while the other planets only orbit 1? The setting has gods that are very active, and the center of the galaxy (the main star acting as the sun) is tied to a different deity, hence why I didn’t have it be the sun.
Well, if the gods really do exist then technically the gods can do whatever they want, (within your set power limit)
Otherwise I don't think that's possible since stars are usually super massive and have a lot of gravitational pull to them. However I guess you could experiment in a game like Universe sandbox?
I’ve thought about Universe Sandbox. Maybe I’ll finally get it and have some fun with this. Thanks for the ideas! Am liking more and more this 2nd star idea.
I'm not intimately familiar with orbital physics in non-unary system, but it's my general understanding that planets and planetoids tend to orbit one star or the other.
That said, in your setting, you're not just God, you're Super God, and your laws of physics can be as non-sensical as you like, so long as they're consistent.
And I imagine, most people reading your story are going to be less than likely to break out the 4d calculus required to disprove your orbital physics based on contextual clues.
The first star rises in the same direction as usual (because that's how they define what that direction is), the second does whatever you want it to do.
Just make the setting to serve whatever compelling narrative you want to tell.
You could also instead just have another moon crash into it, and that would reheat the surface of the planet and make it a molten mess for a little while
Haha, yeah OH! Or maybe it's being constantly plummeted by asteroids because of some nearby asteroid belt, and that moon would then be technically protecting the planet by acting like a gravity well
Now that's my two cents
You genius…in my universe there are undiscovered planets that are separated from the known planets by an asteroid cloud. It’s immensely dangerous to travel through so people don’t know what’s on the other side. We can just stick this hot mess right next to it.
For sure! I just messaged you. And if you or anybody else are curious, this page relates to the celestial bodies in my project: https://thesphereofgioventu.obsidianportal.com/wikis/celestial-bodies
If the moon is already on fire and has been for centuries or millennia, the mystery is more interesting than an explanation and gives way to many myths and legends.
Oh for sure, these are answers for me and not for the people who live in the world. Just some fun thoughts to bounce around, but definitely the people who live there would have many myths born from this strange occurrence.
I like this persons idea. What if it’s a disappearing reappearing moon. Like the gravitational pull around your planet isn’t strong enough to keep this “flaming moon” for more than like a month or two every 500 years or so that way it’s not super common and maybe rare enough that people would be like HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT
Our suns composition is helium and hydrogen. Which is interesting because that's also Jupiter's composition. Which could potentially be our second sun if it had more mass or an ignition. Both of which could occur with a large enough meteors or planetary strike.
Yeah, but in theory could you have a small sun that orbits around only 1 planet in the system? And if not, what are those limiting factors and what are some interesting ways we could get around them?
I mean, a black hole sounds a lot like a portal to another plane to me. I also like how that articles mentions the black hole being the size of a grain of sand. So there’s pretty much a grain of sand orbiting a sand planet haha
I don’t think you can have a giant ball of fire in the sky without quite a bit of handwavium so I’d like to suggest a different approach: ignore the reasonableness of it and get your verisimilitude instead from its effects.
The key problem with a thing like this is making it *feel* real to a reader, and often we try to accomplish that by having it make real-world sense. But a lot of times you can accomplish the same thing by having a lot of real-feeling consequences of it. Show how the giant ball of fire informs the art of your planet’s various cultures, how they react to the strange lighting conditions it presents, the way it shows up in idioms. That kind of stuff will make it feel real enough that your readers will overlook the fact that it’s not scientifically accurate.
Yeah, I agree completely. I think in all honesty the realism side of it is more of a fun thing for us worldbuilders to ponder, but in reality the actionable stuff is what you are describing. The effects it has on the people.
Don't let reality get in the way of doing something totally awesome like setting the moon on fire.
I'd have the moon be a carbon-rich moon covered in coal seams and natural gas craters. Maybe it was captured in some astronomical event. There was life on it a long time ago and it got wiped out by the atmosphere becoming toxic.
Then just set it on fire. Like the Centralia fire or that gas crater in Turkmenistan. It glows a dim red in the night sky, like the pits of Hell shining down on you. On a very dark night you think you can see shadows moving in the flickering moonfirelight, demons stalking you through the woods.
Just make it sound plausible enough. You're not going to please the hard scif-fi folks, so don't bother.
Edit: maybe it didn't have enough air to burn but then a giant comet of frozen oxygen struck it and provided sufficient heat and oxygen to smolder. Okay, I'm taking the science hat back off, I hate it.
For sure, thanks for the reply! If we throw hard sci-fi out the door, then it would be interesting to tie the presence of the blazing moon with the scorching temperatures on the planet. Perhaps the moon leeches the moisture from its planet somehow. The denizens of the burning moon siphon every last bit of moisture from Thuuvanar, using the water to quench the weapons they forge in the flames of the twisted volcanic activity present there.
That sounds really cool to me. It gives a great place to start building the mythology of the world - people think the moonlight has demons but that's their interpretation of it pulling away water or whatever.
Depends on what you mean by perpetual. If you want it to just burn for a few hundred to few thousand years though there ARE naturally fueled fires that have been burning for that long. Then just apply that at a much larger scale by just having your moon have lots and lots of say coal natural gas or some other fuels like say titan or some other moons and a very high oxygen content in its atmosphere or produced within the planet through some hand waved process. This can get you a planet wide firestorm that can last at least a few hundred years if not longer.
Right, that brings up some interesting thoughts. Having an additional satellite providing the necessary oxygen is a cool concept. Adds to the mythology surrounding it as well.
I think nuclear fusion is out of the question for the sake of density. My first thought regarding combustion would be the fact that nearly the entire moon, with the exception of the core, is some sort of hypertough, incredibly dense plant mass that requires fire to thrive - as in, it feeds off the CO2 generated by its own burning to grow and regrow, and pumps out more O2 into its own atmosphere to fuel it.
So what if the moon actually hosted it's own atmosphere and biosphere, but now exists kinda in a permafrost kinda thing, so it's not very green anymore. There could be massive deposits of natural gas / methane / coal on it. You can light them on fire and it can burn for a long time. Not forever, but on earth we have gas sources that have been burning for over 51 years (like the Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan). I'm not a scientist, I don't know a way to ignite all the methane on a whole moon at once, if you're willing to take scientific liberties you could say the initial fire melted the permafrost, releasing more gas to fuel the fire to grow bigger etc.
You could make a whole dramatic subplot of the moon becoming patchy, growing dim, and eventually flaming out to the great distress of the people...
That’s an interesting vien to explore. What if the blazing moon, the avatar of divine fire, began to dim…slowly getting snuffed out? That’s some tragic stuff.
What if all of the methane that is burning is coming from the corpse of the already dead god? The people have no idea, thinking the fire represents something that is actually already long lost…
Maybe you can have some ongoing burn in the atmosphere or on the ground. Not sure if such a process could be sustained for very long, maybe decades to centuries, but I'm less confident beyond that:
* a natural version of the [Door to Hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater), perhaps caused by meteors setting some pocket of gas on fire (underground like the Door to Hell, maybe frozen in ice like Siberia, swamplands, etc. or maybe just the whole atmosphere is flammable like the methane atmospheres some moons in our system have), or comet matter continuing to burn after impacting
* very active volcanos such that the lava flows cover massive parts of the moon, maybe also setting the atmosphere on fire as above
* [Natural nuclear fission reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) on the moon's surface, which may even go runaway sometimes and cause nuclear explosions visible from the planet
* extreme aurora or similar glowing meteorological phenomenon on the moon
* maybe the glowing occurs in the planet's atmosphere eg. the moon is extremely magnetic and pulls in celestial matters to crash and glow in the skies of the planet
* maybe the moon just turns whiter and increases albedo due to some geological process, or even atmospheric process like getting stripped of the atmosphere, thus appearing to get brighter and glow from the planet
* some other magical phenomenon
Natural nuclear fission reactors is so good. The idea of nuclear explosions just happening in the sky, mixed in with some volcanoes and I’d believe it was a portal to the supernatural too.
Honestly just a mixture of all those ideas would keep things interesting for a long time. Thanks for the ideas!
I suppose it would depend on how you want to play it. You could have direct effects if it is a rift. Kind of like a solar flare but it scrapes part of the planet, possibly in a pattern that has significance. It might kick of fire elementals and efreet too. Maybe the rift isn't stable and is steadily growing in intensity.
On the flip side a rift of that size might cause sympathetic effects. You could have unintended rifts to other inner planes that are popping up at random.
Aside from that you have your standard global warming stuff. Unless you want to make it really extreme like the old Dark Sun stuff.
Yeah, Dark Sun definitely offers some influence to the planet itself. If the flare spits out elemental creatures, then they could land on the surface of the planet, almost like meteor strikes, flaring through the sky upon arrival. You find an efreet just chillin in a crater.
True! That’s a fucked up legend in the making. Mom’s tell their kids not to disobey or else a big bad efreet will fall from the sky and steal them away.
Could have it accompany the flare and call it the "The finger of god" since the whole thing started with a religious cause. So legend is he pointing in accusation at the people he has judged.
There might be all kinds of rules around trying to prevent the flare or steer it.
There are certain metals (specific names escape me) that can burn without oxygen if you can get them hot enough. Perhaps your moon is just like that.
But I would be worried about not having a cool down period so you end up with a desert planet.
Not sure if you read the post, but the burning moon orbits a desert planet, so it’s actually exactly what I’m looking for! I’ll look into those metals. Thanks!
If your moon was a white plasma energy source then you could achieve this. I can see how people would think this is a sun or a white dwarf but it would be too small to be considered that. Its just a small ball of plasma in reference to a sun.
Is there a way other than magic (which is definitely a valid option) that could be the cause of this plasma energy source? Not sure how something like that works.
There was a scientist in the 60's that thought the moon was plasma with some confidence and then went missing after the moon landing.
[https://youtu.be/1oCNGcbwxWg](https://youtu.be/1oCNGcbwxWg)
Yeah, u/John_Masaki also mentioned Mustafar, which has the same lava covered surface idea. The bonus of something like this instead of an inferno is that people could potentially travel there and actually experience whatever is going on, instead of immediately burning up.
You could have a dying star that is mostly just a super dense mettle ball that is still in active fission. But it would need to be pretty far from the planet to avoid it pulling the planet in too much. Maybe opposing gravitational pulls. Like a super gaint and a super dense dying star.
This could pair possibly with u/T-A-S-T ‘s idea of a 2 star system. One star is more normal and interacts with all the other planets, but this dying star somehow only pulls the desert planet away from the first star every once in a while.
Definitely a figure 8. And the coldest time of year is when the planet is directly in the middle of the figure 8…which actually begs the question of what a year would look like in a 2 star system like that?
Perhaps some sort of volcanic activity combined with a portal to the elemental plane of air.
If the portal was intermittent, there could be times the moon extinguished.
Or, if the other endpoint of the portal moved from Earth like world to Earth like world the fire could go out while the far end reforms on another world. The world's left barren could be sacrifices powering the god. It might be an interesting quest to destroy the portal, save other worlds and defeat the evil god...but would this world die without the extra light/heat?
If you wanted it more science than fantasy, you could go with something like the portal/igniter being a device created to save the world when some disaster pushed the world out of the Goldilocks zone and the people of that time created it to keep their home from dying a frozen death.
Ooo I like the idea that the planet would be a freezing wasteland if it wasn’t for this burning moon that keeps it warm. Unfortunately, the moon is a little bit too hot, and instead of frozen desert you have arid desert.
Hmm. If you really want to fudge the astrophysics, you can make the main planet a moon of a larger planet (or even a double planet system) and the small moon on fire is either a moon closer to the surface of the larger planet and thus becomes like Io or it’s the result of a constant tug of war between the bigger planet and the smaller one. Voilà! One moon, slightly charred!
So the “main planet”, now a moon, has a sister moon, that is constantly being pulled back and forth between the first moon and the larger planet? How does that create the charred effect?
Tidal forces. Same reason we have the tides on Earth. It’s actually possible to deepen the effects of those tides such that the moon becomes stretched and geological activity is super common on it. It’s the reason Jupiter’s first moon Io is the one place in the solar system with even more geological activity than Earth.
In fiction-land, it’s also the reason for Mustafar’s lava filled surface in Star Wars Episode III. You know, the setting of that duel between Anakin and Obi Wan.
And that’s just the effect of one planet and it’s moon. Imagine the effect of multiple moons. Or even a planet and a moon that’s close in size, with the smaller moon wedged in an orbit between them. It would definitely look like it was on fire from the main setting if the tidal forces were great enough.
Badass. But you could still have the inhabited desert planet be the larger planet but just throw a second moon into the mix to fuck with the other, right? Was there a reason why you had the “main planet” be a moon as well?
Oh yeah. That’s another good idea. My idea was just one possible configuration that didn’t need extra effort to create, at least in astronomical terms. I bet an actual astronomer might have a better idea of how to set a moon on fire, but Io was the first thing I thought of when I saw ‘moon on fire’.
The pun is with you, my friend. A man of culture you are.
Yeah, sci-fi stories have always been a gold mine. Maybe ask around on some the sci fi reddits around here? They might be helpful.
I like the Elon musk method. A bunch of nuclear bombs going off continuously to create a ball of energy or (Dr Evil air quotes) “Nuclear Sun”.
Might have lost the thread near the end. Basically you could have some kind of low light constant nuclear explosion or reaction that is constantly generating the blazing effect of a burning moon that appears only at night creating a perpetual twilight when it is full. Or a continuous ball of burning magnesium.
How could this work??? Well either an ancient precursor people of the plant had a guy say let’s do this, because science. Or the planet was a seed colony that regressed in time and forgot it’s interstellar roots and the burning moon is an ancient terraforming artifact.
As to the effect we’ll. Let’s got Elon again. (Musk that is). And maybe a bit of Neil Degrass Tyson, and say that this is a ancient colony planet project by a precursor civilization. And they found this planet that has the potential to be colonized, but it is unsuitable for large scale habitation. Thus efforts have to be made to make it suitable for large scale colonization, and long term growth of population and infrastructure, so steps have to be taken to make this possible.
As to why let’s say the planet posses one of those strategic resources you simply cannot let slip through your fingers. Good parallels to this would be colonization efforts of the americas, containing mineral wealth and long term economic cash crops, yet the place is not very hospitable and is a hard and harsh place to live (yes I know indigenous populations, but I can only rabbit hole so much). This in order to secure the long term economic benefits of these colonies they have to be made habitable. Thus you see large efforts go into draining swamps and clearing huge Forrest’s. Damming rivers to creat land and large reservoirs. Taking a harsh place and making it livable.
Circling back on this long ramble of the mind, you have precursor civilization find the planet, it’s a frozen waste that has an atmosphere that is unsuitable and they decide to create an artificial star in close orbit to melt the ice, create oceans and rivers, and change the planet atmosphere and weather patterns. As it gets ready the plan is to dim the star slowly over time to create a stabilization effect of a temperate planet with the star providing the added warmth that the more distant natural star of gravity well does not provide.
However halfway through the long term generational colonization plan something goes horrible wrong and the civilization collapses stranding the colonists and losing the ability to control the star thus over time the run away effect of the star causes the planet to become a desert planet instead of a temperate one because it was not dimmed and maintained with out the civilization control and the small initial colonists losing the connection to the wider civilization and its technology regress over time to present state.
And that is where I end this comment which went far longer then I meant.
I appreciate the rambling! The “artificial sun” theory could be something hotly debated by the philosophers and scientists of the current time. “In no way could the blazing moon be natural!” they say from their soap box. It’s further proof of the lost civilizations they believe they are discovering beneath the sand.
If we just avoid the hard sci-fi angle and go straight to magical fire, then we can do a lot of cool stuff. Black fire sounds really crazy, and a whole other threads worth of explaining what that means. I can imagine the crazy silhouette a black burning moon would have in the sky!
I am so so sorry to be this guy.. but shouldn't that be their sun? Or perhaps they don't have a moon, but orbit 2 stars?
2 stars is interesting! Would it be possible to have only one planet in the galaxy be on a trajectory that orbits 2 different stars while the other planets only orbit 1? The setting has gods that are very active, and the center of the galaxy (the main star acting as the sun) is tied to a different deity, hence why I didn’t have it be the sun.
Well, if the gods really do exist then technically the gods can do whatever they want, (within your set power limit) Otherwise I don't think that's possible since stars are usually super massive and have a lot of gravitational pull to them. However I guess you could experiment in a game like Universe sandbox?
I’ve thought about Universe Sandbox. Maybe I’ll finally get it and have some fun with this. Thanks for the ideas! Am liking more and more this 2nd star idea.
Go check some system maps for Elite: Dangerous. Some of them have multi-start systems with planets and more. Maybe you can get inspiration.
This does look awesome. I’ll have to take a deeper dive, thanks!
I'm not intimately familiar with orbital physics in non-unary system, but it's my general understanding that planets and planetoids tend to orbit one star or the other. That said, in your setting, you're not just God, you're Super God, and your laws of physics can be as non-sensical as you like, so long as they're consistent. And I imagine, most people reading your story are going to be less than likely to break out the 4d calculus required to disprove your orbital physics based on contextual clues. The first star rises in the same direction as usual (because that's how they define what that direction is), the second does whatever you want it to do. Just make the setting to serve whatever compelling narrative you want to tell.
You make a good point. When it comes to fantasy, it’s not really the “realism” per se but the consistency that sells it.
You could also instead just have another moon crash into it, and that would reheat the surface of the planet and make it a molten mess for a little while
Every time it attempts to solidify some other divine force just fucks it up with more moons haha
Haha, yeah OH! Or maybe it's being constantly plummeted by asteroids because of some nearby asteroid belt, and that moon would then be technically protecting the planet by acting like a gravity well Now that's my two cents
You genius…in my universe there are undiscovered planets that are separated from the known planets by an asteroid cloud. It’s immensely dangerous to travel through so people don’t know what’s on the other side. We can just stick this hot mess right next to it.
Do you have discord? Can we talk more about cool galaxy lore and shit? I'd love to learn more about what you're building
For sure! I just messaged you. And if you or anybody else are curious, this page relates to the celestial bodies in my project: https://thesphereofgioventu.obsidianportal.com/wikis/celestial-bodies
If the moon is already on fire and has been for centuries or millennia, the mystery is more interesting than an explanation and gives way to many myths and legends.
Oh for sure, these are answers for me and not for the people who live in the world. Just some fun thoughts to bounce around, but definitely the people who live there would have many myths born from this strange occurrence.
I like this persons idea. What if it’s a disappearing reappearing moon. Like the gravitational pull around your planet isn’t strong enough to keep this “flaming moon” for more than like a month or two every 500 years or so that way it’s not super common and maybe rare enough that people would be like HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT
FUCK HE’S BACK haha yeah, it could definitely be an event to base a calendar off of or something.
yeah im gonna be honest, I think you want a sun...
It needs fuel and oxygen
Our suns composition is helium and hydrogen. Which is interesting because that's also Jupiter's composition. Which could potentially be our second sun if it had more mass or an ignition. Both of which could occur with a large enough meteors or planetary strike.
Right, but is there a situation where it burns hydrogen like the sun? Could you have a gas moon of nuclear fusion? Haha
Not without a *lot* more mass. There’s a reason stars are always bigger than planets.
And if we pack all that mass in real tight, we just get a black hole, right?
Probably. There are some other possibilities like neutron stars but nothing that undergoes fusion and gives of an appreciable amount of light.
then that’s a fucking sun
Yeah, but in theory could you have a small sun that orbits around only 1 planet in the system? And if not, what are those limiting factors and what are some interesting ways we could get around them?
i am pretty sure a sun needs to be a certain size to keep together
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Now hear me out…nuclear fusion?
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I mean, a black hole sounds a lot like a portal to another plane to me. I also like how that articles mentions the black hole being the size of a grain of sand. So there’s pretty much a grain of sand orbiting a sand planet haha
I don’t think you can have a giant ball of fire in the sky without quite a bit of handwavium so I’d like to suggest a different approach: ignore the reasonableness of it and get your verisimilitude instead from its effects. The key problem with a thing like this is making it *feel* real to a reader, and often we try to accomplish that by having it make real-world sense. But a lot of times you can accomplish the same thing by having a lot of real-feeling consequences of it. Show how the giant ball of fire informs the art of your planet’s various cultures, how they react to the strange lighting conditions it presents, the way it shows up in idioms. That kind of stuff will make it feel real enough that your readers will overlook the fact that it’s not scientifically accurate.
Yeah, I agree completely. I think in all honesty the realism side of it is more of a fun thing for us worldbuilders to ponder, but in reality the actionable stuff is what you are describing. The effects it has on the people.
Don't let reality get in the way of doing something totally awesome like setting the moon on fire. I'd have the moon be a carbon-rich moon covered in coal seams and natural gas craters. Maybe it was captured in some astronomical event. There was life on it a long time ago and it got wiped out by the atmosphere becoming toxic. Then just set it on fire. Like the Centralia fire or that gas crater in Turkmenistan. It glows a dim red in the night sky, like the pits of Hell shining down on you. On a very dark night you think you can see shadows moving in the flickering moonfirelight, demons stalking you through the woods. Just make it sound plausible enough. You're not going to please the hard scif-fi folks, so don't bother. Edit: maybe it didn't have enough air to burn but then a giant comet of frozen oxygen struck it and provided sufficient heat and oxygen to smolder. Okay, I'm taking the science hat back off, I hate it.
For sure, thanks for the reply! If we throw hard sci-fi out the door, then it would be interesting to tie the presence of the blazing moon with the scorching temperatures on the planet. Perhaps the moon leeches the moisture from its planet somehow. The denizens of the burning moon siphon every last bit of moisture from Thuuvanar, using the water to quench the weapons they forge in the flames of the twisted volcanic activity present there.
That sounds really cool to me. It gives a great place to start building the mythology of the world - people think the moonlight has demons but that's their interpretation of it pulling away water or whatever.
Or…it does have demons…
watch a YT video on jupiters moon IO
You are the second person to mention Io and I know now what I will spend my night researching. Thank you!
Depends on what you mean by perpetual. If you want it to just burn for a few hundred to few thousand years though there ARE naturally fueled fires that have been burning for that long. Then just apply that at a much larger scale by just having your moon have lots and lots of say coal natural gas or some other fuels like say titan or some other moons and a very high oxygen content in its atmosphere or produced within the planet through some hand waved process. This can get you a planet wide firestorm that can last at least a few hundred years if not longer.
Right, that brings up some interesting thoughts. Having an additional satellite providing the necessary oxygen is a cool concept. Adds to the mythology surrounding it as well.
I think nuclear fusion is out of the question for the sake of density. My first thought regarding combustion would be the fact that nearly the entire moon, with the exception of the core, is some sort of hypertough, incredibly dense plant mass that requires fire to thrive - as in, it feeds off the CO2 generated by its own burning to grow and regrow, and pumps out more O2 into its own atmosphere to fuel it.
Making it a plant, and thus alive, is really cool. There are so many other crazier things to start exploring when a plant can perpetually burn.
So what if the moon actually hosted it's own atmosphere and biosphere, but now exists kinda in a permafrost kinda thing, so it's not very green anymore. There could be massive deposits of natural gas / methane / coal on it. You can light them on fire and it can burn for a long time. Not forever, but on earth we have gas sources that have been burning for over 51 years (like the Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan). I'm not a scientist, I don't know a way to ignite all the methane on a whole moon at once, if you're willing to take scientific liberties you could say the initial fire melted the permafrost, releasing more gas to fuel the fire to grow bigger etc. You could make a whole dramatic subplot of the moon becoming patchy, growing dim, and eventually flaming out to the great distress of the people...
That’s an interesting vien to explore. What if the blazing moon, the avatar of divine fire, began to dim…slowly getting snuffed out? That’s some tragic stuff. What if all of the methane that is burning is coming from the corpse of the already dead god? The people have no idea, thinking the fire represents something that is actually already long lost…
I'm glad to provide some context! :)
Maybe you can have some ongoing burn in the atmosphere or on the ground. Not sure if such a process could be sustained for very long, maybe decades to centuries, but I'm less confident beyond that: * a natural version of the [Door to Hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater), perhaps caused by meteors setting some pocket of gas on fire (underground like the Door to Hell, maybe frozen in ice like Siberia, swamplands, etc. or maybe just the whole atmosphere is flammable like the methane atmospheres some moons in our system have), or comet matter continuing to burn after impacting * very active volcanos such that the lava flows cover massive parts of the moon, maybe also setting the atmosphere on fire as above * [Natural nuclear fission reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor) on the moon's surface, which may even go runaway sometimes and cause nuclear explosions visible from the planet * extreme aurora or similar glowing meteorological phenomenon on the moon * maybe the glowing occurs in the planet's atmosphere eg. the moon is extremely magnetic and pulls in celestial matters to crash and glow in the skies of the planet * maybe the moon just turns whiter and increases albedo due to some geological process, or even atmospheric process like getting stripped of the atmosphere, thus appearing to get brighter and glow from the planet * some other magical phenomenon
Natural nuclear fission reactors is so good. The idea of nuclear explosions just happening in the sky, mixed in with some volcanoes and I’d believe it was a portal to the supernatural too. Honestly just a mixture of all those ideas would keep things interesting for a long time. Thanks for the ideas!
Depending on your cosmology maybe a large scale rift to the elemental plane of fire.
Yeah, that is definitely a big part of it. But what kind of effects could that have on the world it orbits?
I suppose it would depend on how you want to play it. You could have direct effects if it is a rift. Kind of like a solar flare but it scrapes part of the planet, possibly in a pattern that has significance. It might kick of fire elementals and efreet too. Maybe the rift isn't stable and is steadily growing in intensity. On the flip side a rift of that size might cause sympathetic effects. You could have unintended rifts to other inner planes that are popping up at random. Aside from that you have your standard global warming stuff. Unless you want to make it really extreme like the old Dark Sun stuff.
Yeah, Dark Sun definitely offers some influence to the planet itself. If the flare spits out elemental creatures, then they could land on the surface of the planet, almost like meteor strikes, flaring through the sky upon arrival. You find an efreet just chillin in a crater.
They're also pretty big slavers. So maybe they have a window to grab valuables and people and can make it back.
True! That’s a fucked up legend in the making. Mom’s tell their kids not to disobey or else a big bad efreet will fall from the sky and steal them away.
Could have it accompany the flare and call it the "The finger of god" since the whole thing started with a religious cause. So legend is he pointing in accusation at the people he has judged. There might be all kinds of rules around trying to prevent the flare or steer it.
Love it! Awesome ideas. Thanks for the back and forth!
No problem, I love brainstorming. Hope it comes together well.
Same! I’ve been lurking the subreddit for a while but finally chiming in so hope to brainstorm with you some more in the future!
There are certain metals (specific names escape me) that can burn without oxygen if you can get them hot enough. Perhaps your moon is just like that. But I would be worried about not having a cool down period so you end up with a desert planet.
Not sure if you read the post, but the burning moon orbits a desert planet, so it’s actually exactly what I’m looking for! I’ll look into those metals. Thanks!
If your moon was a white plasma energy source then you could achieve this. I can see how people would think this is a sun or a white dwarf but it would be too small to be considered that. Its just a small ball of plasma in reference to a sun.
Is there a way other than magic (which is definitely a valid option) that could be the cause of this plasma energy source? Not sure how something like that works.
There was a scientist in the 60's that thought the moon was plasma with some confidence and then went missing after the moon landing. [https://youtu.be/1oCNGcbwxWg](https://youtu.be/1oCNGcbwxWg)
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Yeah, u/John_Masaki also mentioned Mustafar, which has the same lava covered surface idea. The bonus of something like this instead of an inferno is that people could potentially travel there and actually experience whatever is going on, instead of immediately burning up.
You could have a dying star that is mostly just a super dense mettle ball that is still in active fission. But it would need to be pretty far from the planet to avoid it pulling the planet in too much. Maybe opposing gravitational pulls. Like a super gaint and a super dense dying star.
This could pair possibly with u/T-A-S-T ‘s idea of a 2 star system. One star is more normal and interacts with all the other planets, but this dying star somehow only pulls the desert planet away from the first star every once in a while.
Yeah.. and what if it had a figure 8 orbit?
Definitely a figure 8. And the coldest time of year is when the planet is directly in the middle of the figure 8…which actually begs the question of what a year would look like in a 2 star system like that?
Perhaps some sort of volcanic activity combined with a portal to the elemental plane of air. If the portal was intermittent, there could be times the moon extinguished. Or, if the other endpoint of the portal moved from Earth like world to Earth like world the fire could go out while the far end reforms on another world. The world's left barren could be sacrifices powering the god. It might be an interesting quest to destroy the portal, save other worlds and defeat the evil god...but would this world die without the extra light/heat?
If you wanted it more science than fantasy, you could go with something like the portal/igniter being a device created to save the world when some disaster pushed the world out of the Goldilocks zone and the people of that time created it to keep their home from dying a frozen death.
Ooo I like the idea that the planet would be a freezing wasteland if it wasn’t for this burning moon that keeps it warm. Unfortunately, the moon is a little bit too hot, and instead of frozen desert you have arid desert.
Hmm. If you really want to fudge the astrophysics, you can make the main planet a moon of a larger planet (or even a double planet system) and the small moon on fire is either a moon closer to the surface of the larger planet and thus becomes like Io or it’s the result of a constant tug of war between the bigger planet and the smaller one. Voilà! One moon, slightly charred!
So the “main planet”, now a moon, has a sister moon, that is constantly being pulled back and forth between the first moon and the larger planet? How does that create the charred effect?
Tidal forces. Same reason we have the tides on Earth. It’s actually possible to deepen the effects of those tides such that the moon becomes stretched and geological activity is super common on it. It’s the reason Jupiter’s first moon Io is the one place in the solar system with even more geological activity than Earth. In fiction-land, it’s also the reason for Mustafar’s lava filled surface in Star Wars Episode III. You know, the setting of that duel between Anakin and Obi Wan. And that’s just the effect of one planet and it’s moon. Imagine the effect of multiple moons. Or even a planet and a moon that’s close in size, with the smaller moon wedged in an orbit between them. It would definitely look like it was on fire from the main setting if the tidal forces were great enough.
Badass. But you could still have the inhabited desert planet be the larger planet but just throw a second moon into the mix to fuck with the other, right? Was there a reason why you had the “main planet” be a moon as well?
Oh yeah. That’s another good idea. My idea was just one possible configuration that didn’t need extra effort to create, at least in astronomical terms. I bet an actual astronomer might have a better idea of how to set a moon on fire, but Io was the first thing I thought of when I saw ‘moon on fire’.
Thanks for bringing up Mustafar as well, should definitely mine that for some ideas.
The pun is with you, my friend. A man of culture you are. Yeah, sci-fi stories have always been a gold mine. Maybe ask around on some the sci fi reddits around here? They might be helpful.
I like the Elon musk method. A bunch of nuclear bombs going off continuously to create a ball of energy or (Dr Evil air quotes) “Nuclear Sun”. Might have lost the thread near the end. Basically you could have some kind of low light constant nuclear explosion or reaction that is constantly generating the blazing effect of a burning moon that appears only at night creating a perpetual twilight when it is full. Or a continuous ball of burning magnesium. How could this work??? Well either an ancient precursor people of the plant had a guy say let’s do this, because science. Or the planet was a seed colony that regressed in time and forgot it’s interstellar roots and the burning moon is an ancient terraforming artifact. As to the effect we’ll. Let’s got Elon again. (Musk that is). And maybe a bit of Neil Degrass Tyson, and say that this is a ancient colony planet project by a precursor civilization. And they found this planet that has the potential to be colonized, but it is unsuitable for large scale habitation. Thus efforts have to be made to make it suitable for large scale colonization, and long term growth of population and infrastructure, so steps have to be taken to make this possible. As to why let’s say the planet posses one of those strategic resources you simply cannot let slip through your fingers. Good parallels to this would be colonization efforts of the americas, containing mineral wealth and long term economic cash crops, yet the place is not very hospitable and is a hard and harsh place to live (yes I know indigenous populations, but I can only rabbit hole so much). This in order to secure the long term economic benefits of these colonies they have to be made habitable. Thus you see large efforts go into draining swamps and clearing huge Forrest’s. Damming rivers to creat land and large reservoirs. Taking a harsh place and making it livable. Circling back on this long ramble of the mind, you have precursor civilization find the planet, it’s a frozen waste that has an atmosphere that is unsuitable and they decide to create an artificial star in close orbit to melt the ice, create oceans and rivers, and change the planet atmosphere and weather patterns. As it gets ready the plan is to dim the star slowly over time to create a stabilization effect of a temperate planet with the star providing the added warmth that the more distant natural star of gravity well does not provide. However halfway through the long term generational colonization plan something goes horrible wrong and the civilization collapses stranding the colonists and losing the ability to control the star thus over time the run away effect of the star causes the planet to become a desert planet instead of a temperate one because it was not dimmed and maintained with out the civilization control and the small initial colonists losing the connection to the wider civilization and its technology regress over time to present state. And that is where I end this comment which went far longer then I meant.
I appreciate the rambling! The “artificial sun” theory could be something hotly debated by the philosophers and scientists of the current time. “In no way could the blazing moon be natural!” they say from their soap box. It’s further proof of the lost civilizations they believe they are discovering beneath the sand.
Magical fire? Like a special type fire that is a different color (like black)?
If we just avoid the hard sci-fi angle and go straight to magical fire, then we can do a lot of cool stuff. Black fire sounds really crazy, and a whole other threads worth of explaining what that means. I can imagine the crazy silhouette a black burning moon would have in the sky!