Planets Crazy Close to Their Star

[Greasetrap42]

Are there any records for the closest planets orbiting a star?

I'm sure others have found better, but this Class V gas giant has a major orbital axis of .01AU. and an orbital period of 0.2days. (Mercury's is 0,39AU, orbital period of 88 days.)
GRAEA DRYOU YO-R C7-29 (Hawking's Gap)

 

[Chrystoph]

Don't belittle your achievements, they are yours and you earned them.

 

[CMDR SleepyDelegate]

I have found suspiciously similar system... This Class V giant has semi major axis of 0.02AU... System: Eorm Chreou HR-D d12-25

 

[Orvidius]

I love those hot jupiters! They always make me smile.

 

[Sapyx]

Are you fuel scooping while around that planet? There are worlds where this is the case.

Records for "closest planet to star" are difficult to verify, as there are planets out there with extremely elliptic, cometary-style orbits, that have a semimajor axis quite far out, but which swing in super-close to the star during the brief, torrid summer.

I'd also like to point out, with sadness, that both the OP and Sleepy are relatively new players and as such have missed out on the "golden age" of Hot Jupiters. Previously, when a Hot Jupiter exceeded a temperature of over 9000 K, it was rendered as a super-bright-white glowing ball. Apparently, FD originally intended such worlds to have their own unique appearance, but as they're so rare, the appearance was never introduced, leaving a featureless glowing white ball that caused graphics glitches. Example thread. To fix the glitches, sadly the Glowing White Giants had to be removed, with the 3.0 update. Planets which used to be GWGs now look like ordinary Class V giants. They're still super-hot, and (usually) super-close to their stars.

 

[Heavy Johnson]

Yeah, RIP the GGGs, they were one of the best non-intentional feature of the game. shakes fist at FDEV

 

[Heavy Johnson]

EDAstro's file list includes one for Hot Jupiters, ie that have orbital periods < 10 days.

The shortest orbital period in that file is Agnaiz NS-U f2-1722, which has a class V orbiting at just over 11 minutes! The system has a POI in the Galactic Mapping project.

 

[andrewg_oz]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Skardee. The challenge is to take off from Skardee 1 without heatsinks

 

[Pat Healy]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Skardee. The challenge is to take off from Skardee 1 without heatsinks

I used heat sinks and still had heat well over 300%, and that was before I started the longest FSD charge ever. Fun place, will visit again.

 

[CMDR SleepyDelegate]

Are you fuel scooping while around that planet? There are worlds where this is the case.

Records for "closest planet to star" are difficult to verify, as there are planets out there with extremely elliptic, cometary-style orbits, that have a semimajor axis quite far out, but which swing in super-close to the star during the brief, torrid summer.

I'd also like to point out, with sadness, that both the OP and Sleepy are relatively new players and as such have missed out on the "golden age" of Hot Jupiters. Previously, when a Hot Jupiter exceeded a temperature of over 9000 K, it was rendered as a super-bright-white glowing ball. Apparently, FD originally intended such worlds to have their own unique appearance, but as they're so rare, the appearance was never introduced, leaving a featureless glowing white ball that caused graphics glitches. Example thread. To fix the glitches, sadly the Glowing White Giants had to be removed, with the 3.0 update. Planets which used to be GWGs now look like ordinary Class V giants. They're still super-hot, and (usually) super-close to their stars.

Agree! I am sad myself! Despite playing Elite back in the good old days on my Atari and despite watching the development closely, I sort of missed the release of the game and discovered it again in May 2020... Therefore I have missed most of the stuff you guys have experienced...

Also, what you just said - does it mean, that my search for glowing gas giants was futile? This feature has been removed from the game? Or does it only apply to glowing white giants?

 

[Orvidius]

Also, what you just said - does it mean, that my search for glowing gas giants was futile? This feature has been removed from the game? Or does it only apply to glowing white giants?

It's just the glowing white appearance that was removed. The planets are still there, but they look like ordinary Class-V giants.

 

[Sapyx]

GWGs (glowing white giants) and GMGs (glowing magenta giants) have both been removed; if you see Youtube videos, forum posts or whatnot about such things, they no longer exist in-game. GGGs (glowing green giants) remain, and have even been canonized with recognition in the Codex.

 

[schlowi123]

Congratulations to your find. It's always special coming out if witchspace and facing a Hot Jovian

In this thread I show some of the closest-to-the-sun-they-orbit planets, which is (more or less) equal to the distance to arrival since the eccentricity of most orbits is not extreme.

Here is a list for the types of planets that I've found to be true record holders (I haven't visited all of them so far). The list is compiled from march 2020 EDSM data (and some of the records are from even older data). So it is possible that in the meantime some new recordholders have been found, but these can't be very much closer to their respective star.
If a planet type is not mentioned there it means that many planets of that type are very close (often 1 ls) to their stars.

Have fun going there:

Class I: Dumbae GH-V f2-2840 1 -> 5 ls
Class II: Whuedeou FU-D d13-0 A 1 -> 5 ls
Class III: Wepai GI-K a104-16 A 1 -> 2 ls
Class IV: Prooe Flyuae DQ-Z a54-79 A 1 -> 1 ls -> NO record holder, several Class IV's are that close.
Class V: Blue Bliae NQ-Y d1 A 1 -> dito

Helium-rich GG: Byeia Euq KK-W b29-11 A 1 -> 2 ls
Helium GG: 52 Herculis 1 -> value = 159 ls -> not many of these have been found.

GG with NH4-life: Xeeheou AA-A h11 AB 2 -> 10 ls
GG with H2O-life: Dryu Auf AA-A h30 A 1 -> 2 ls

ELW: Eok Bluae YW-T a16-48 1 -> 6 ls
AW: Lagoon Sector VO-X a2-1 1 -> 7 ls
WW: Ovopp MJ-S a72-0 1 -> 3 ls

Icy body: Preia Phio ES-G a51-10 A 1 -> 1 ls -> it is landable
Rocky body: Skardee III -> was already mentioned
Rocky Ice world: Synuefai YL-M a89-2 A 1 -> 8 ls

unreachable close bonus: Flyooe Phio ZK-F d11-7 A 1

 

[S0rkvild]

Skardee, bubble. That is the best one, you can even land there, but be careful.

 

[Sapyx]

Another thing to remember: the distance reported in-game is the distance to a star's centre, not it's surface. Stars have volume, and at the distances being talked about in this thread, that volume is significant. Earth's Sun, for example, has a radius of 2.32 Ls, so it's physically impossible for a planet to orbit closer than 2.3 Ls around a Sun-sized star. To get less than 1 Ls away, you need a tiny star, like a brown dwarf, white dwarf, black hole or neutron star.

 

[Starsong]

GWGs (glowing white giants) and GMGs (glowing magenta giants) have both been removed; if you see Youtube videos, forum posts or whatnot about such things, they no longer exist in-game. GGGs (glowing green giants) remain, and have even been canonized with recognition in the Codex.

Well... sort of. The old GMGs have been removed, but several of the known GGGs have small purple patches and I’ve found a GMG with small purple patches post 3.4.

 

[Orvidius]

GGGs can have purple patches, yes, but the actual "glowing magenta giants" were patched out. They were nearly 100% glowing magenta.

 

[Martin Shepard]

It's so sad that Frontier removes such things that make our findings a bit more special. I really hope that planets will get more variable with Odyssey.

 

[Shnyrik]

GGGs can have purple patches

Not only GGGs, actually. Surprisingly many other class III GGs of that color scheme turned out to have those pink glowing patches.

That's GGG #14

Spoiler

And this are a couple of other class III GGs very much like it but without green spots.

Spoiler