After FSSing a system a planet with 2.4% Neon on its atmosphere caught my eye, as I've never seen or at least never noticed something like it, so I decided to go check it out and it turned out to be some kind of dark planet. It doesn't seem to reflect the light from the stars in the system, which is strange as both in the system map and in the FSS the planet is yellowish. I had to maneuver and put a nebula behind it to properly make it out. Does it have something to do with the high Neon amount in the atmosphere or is it just a graphical bug?
Stealth Planet
- Thread starter zehcoutinho
- Start date
I've come across a few like that while exploring, as if they are just black orbs floating there and are almost invisible against the background. Not sure what makes it do that, I always assumed it was a graphics/rendering problem and distance since usually they show up after mapping and when I get a closer range to them.
Deleted member 38366
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This is perfectly normal.
All Planets will basically render like that, provided they're far enough from their Parent Star. After all, not a whole lot of light left some 41000Ls from the primary light source...
All Planets will basically render like that, provided they're far enough from their Parent Star. After all, not a whole lot of light left some 41000Ls from the primary light source...
Have you seen how far it is from the star? It's only natural it doesn't reflect much. There isn't much light out there, period.
Hadn't thought of that. So like how a flashlight only illuminates for a certain distance? Interesting! How does that weakening of the light happens? If you don´t mind explaining
It's the inverse square law. Light radiates outwards from a point (a star in this case) and expands as a sphere. You have 100% of the energy at the star but as you move away from it that energy is spread out over the surface of that expanding sphere - and the further out you go, the more thinly that energy is distributed over that expanding sphere. What this means is that if you double the distance, you quarter the intensity of the light (2x the distance = 1/4 of the intensity, 3x the distance = 1/9th of the intensity, 4x = 1/16th etc - it goes by 1/(the square of the factor) so it's called the Inverse Square law).
So a planet at 90 AU is going to have 1/8100 of the illumination of a planet at 1 AU from the star. That's about 9.5 magnitudes difference, or the difference between the sun seen at Earth and about 100 times brighter than the full moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
Cool! Thanks!!!
Yep, it's a "rogue planet" in a remote, elliptical, inclined orbit. Kind of like Persephone in Sol system (currently known IRL as the hypthetical object "Planet Nine"). And it's black because there's no light out there. The most recent correction pass for illumination (was it version 3.2? I forget) rendered the colours of objects much more "realistic" than they used to be, and having a planet that far away from its star being black would indeed be "realistic".