The Chronicles of Local Space

96 Piscium

Star charts

96 Piscium as seen from Sol.	Sol as seen from 96 Piscium.

As seen from Earth, 96 Piscium is an unremarkable K2 dwarf star. The star has an apparent magnitude of 5.72, which makes the star just bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from dark skies. The star is listed as a double star in some star catalogues, however other research has suggested that the star has no companion.

Detail of Flamsteed's map of Pisces with selected stars marked. The position of 96 Piscium is marked with a red circle.

This star is referred to as 96 Piscium throughout the Local Space website. Other names for this star include BD+04° 123, Gliese 33, HD 4628, HIP 3765, HR 222, LHS 121, SAO 109471 and Wolf 25. A more comprehensive list of identifiers for this star may be found on the SIMBAD database. 96 Piscium — or 96 G. Piscium, with the G being an abbreviation of Gould — is only referred to as such in a few star catalogues. Although it bears a number that looks like a Flamsteed number, that number is not a Flamsteed number and is out of sequence with the true Flamsteed numbers of nearby stars (see map). It appears to be missing from some of Flamsteed’s maps even though many stars a full magnitude fainter do appear on these maps.

A possible explanation on why the star is missing may be found by a careful inspection of the map. There is a star at the same declination as 96 Piscium and separated from its position by three degrees that does not correspond to the position of any known star of comparable brightness and position. (This star is indicated on the map with a question mark.) It is possible that 96 Piscium was not plotted in the correct position on the map. The Flamsteed maps are known to contain some errors (for example, 34 Tauri is really the planet Uranus) and this star could be one of these errors. The displacement is not due to proper motion because the proper motion of 96 Piscium is much smaller than the proper motion implied by the map and is in a different direction.

Local Space

The first probe of the Dandelion Project reached this star system in August 2851.

96 Piscium

Belgana

Belgana is a planet that closely resembles Mercury in size, appearance and composition. Its radius is about ten per cent larger than that of Mercury. Like Mercury, it is a dense world and is believed to have a large iron-nickel core. This planet has a weak and patchy magnetic field, which is most likely a relic of an earlier strong magnetic field that is preserved in surface minerals.

Gortalsa

Gortalsa is a small world with a dense, toxic atmosphere.

Gortalsa is a small, hot tidelocked terrestrial planet with a dense and toxic atmosphere mostly composed of carbon dioxide. Despite the tidelocking, the planet maintains a fairly even temperature over its surface due to the dense atmosphere distributing the heat fairly efficiently over the whole planet. The planet superficially resembles Venus, however the atmosphere is much less dense and large gaps in the cloud cover allow the blue sky of the world to be seen.

The low gravity of the world and the lack of a strong magnetic field causes the world to lose its atmosphere over time to the solar wind. As the world loses its atmosphere, the remaining atmosphere conducts heat less and less efficiently, and the termperature difference between the dayside and the nightside will become more and more pronounced. Eventually the world will lose enough of its atmosphere that the remainder of the atmosphere will no longer conduct heat efficiently enough to prevent the remaining atmosphere from freezing out on the night side. When this happens, the rest of the atmosphere will be frozen out on the nightside in only a few thousand years — a mere blink of the eye on geologic timescales — and the world will become almost airless.

Calena

Calena is a habitable world that is home to a minor colony. It also has microbial life. Unlike many colony worlds, it did not require terraforming to be a suitable home for a human colony and Earth-based life.

Nilaqua

Nilaqua is an ice-bound world with a mass of about three times that of Mars. The name means “no water” and was given that name on the belief that the world had no liquid water. This belief is false: liquid water does exist beneath the ice. However, the ice is more than thirty kilometres deep above the liquid water that lies beneath, and such water is difficult to access.

Dheslia

Dheslia (pronunciation: /ˈðɛs·li·ə/, alternative spelling Ðeslia) is a Mars-sized planet with a large moon, Elsa, in a close orbit. Elsa has a radius about half as large as Dheslia. Although the centre of mass of the system lies within Dheslia, Dheslia and Elsa are considered to be a double planet. The moon and planet are tidelocked to each other and have a rotation period of about 12 hours.

Ja’aul

Bandora

Amarra

Yudonë

Yudonë (pronunciation: /juː·ˈdoː·nɛ/, /juː·ˈdəʊ·ni/ or /juː·ˈdoʊ·ni/) is a distant planet with an eccentric and somewhat inclined orbit. The planet is massive, with a mass about seven times that of Jupiter. Yudonë takes more than 3,000 years to orbit its sun once. The planet emits much more heat than it receives from its local sun. This heat comes mainly from contraction due to the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism. The heat causes the clouds to be quite turbulent despite the great distance from its sun.

It has a large moon nearly as large as the Earth. This moon is an inhospitable Triton-class moon with active ice volcanoes.

Acknowledgements

• The excerpt from Flamsteed’s 1729 edition of Atlas Coelestis was obtained from an online version of the atlas hosted by the Linda Hall Library.

Further reading

Nonfictional links

• 96 Piscium in the ARI Database for Nearby Stars.
• HR222 in the Bright Star Catalogue.
• is in the Encyclopedia of Suns.
• BD +4 123 in the Internet Stellar Database.
• LHS 121 in SIMBAD Astronomical Database.
• BD+04 123 / HR 222 in Solstation.
• HD 4628 in Wikipedia.

This document was last modified 2010-12-31 06:00:46 UTC.
Copyright © 2004-2010 Bruce Mills. All rights reserved.
This page is a static HTML page that was created with PHP.