Five Terraformables around a Secondary Star (and a sixth co-planet!)

[SillySMS]

First off, I'm given to understand that the habitable zone of a star is about three orbits wide at most: were they any more closely packed, you'd get planets getting kicked out of orbit.

This makes it quite curious when I run across five planets (plus a sixth co-planet) orbiting the same star.

What I suspect is going on is that these worlds are getting enough heat from the primary that the habitable zone of the secondary has become much broader. Were the secondary F-class by itself, these would likely be very cold worlds, but the primary provides a decent amount of baseline heating.

To put it another way, if the habitable zone is 270K to 370K, then the warmest worlds are getting 37% more heat than the coldest worlds in the zone.

However, if you have a primary which is providing a baseline 150K of heat, then the warmest worlds are receiving 83% more heat from the secondary that they're orbiting.

I'll post the system ID when I get to a station and tag it.

Another amusing anecdote is that when I jumped in, I thought "funny, this star seems way too orange for its D mass code". It was only when the codex popped up "K-class giant discovered!" that I realized where the discrepancy was.

 

[Alkibiades]

Thats exactly how the hab zone works in elite. You can see this very often in systems with neutron stars. The secondary doesnt matter, could be a brown dwarf but 5-8 tf planets. Seen this a couple of times.

 

[Sapyx]

You'll normally see then when there's a big discrepancy between the luminosity of the primary and secondary stars eg. a Red Giant primary and a Red Dwarf secondary.

In effect, the entire secondary star system is sitting inside the Goldilocks Zone of the primary star, so virtually every planet that fits the gravity criterion (0.4 to 1.99 Earth G) will end up being ELW or terraformable.

In ED, Goldilocks Zones are additive, which means that they're generally wider in multi-star systems than in single-star systems. Out there in the real world, Goldilocks Zones are more likely to be subtractive, as the fluctuating seasonal intensity means that planets will frequently dip into either the "too hot" or "too cold" zones, making those planets non-terraformable.