Select the largest inner planet in your Mystery Solar System. ( The Mystery Sola

Question

Select the largest inner planet in your Mystery Solar System. (The Mystery Solar System is not the one which we are located, is a imaginary one, solve the question according to the data in table, so the largest inner planet in the Mystery Solar System is inner planet #5.)

a. Explain which geological processes have been active on the planet in the past and which of these should still be occurring. Support you answers with the relevant data from your Mystery Solar System table.

b. What geological features should be common on the planet’s surface? Explain.

c. Are there features that should be rare or absent on the planet’s surface? Explain.

Hints: Part a should take a few sentences for each geological process. You must justify your answers in terms of models of geological surface processes. Your answer should make it very clear how you get from the data in your Mystery Solar System table to the processes and features you explain.

Known Planets 5 1 Earth mass 6 x 10 24 kg Inner Solar System 3 1 Earth Radius 6.4 x 10M6 m Outer Solar System 1 AU 1.5 x 10M8 km Wavele Orbit ngth Inner Solar Mass Distance Period Tilt Radius No Light System (Earth From Star (Earth Spin (degrees (Earth Reflectivit Greenhouse Emitted Large Small years) (hours) Radii) y Temp (KK) (nm) Moons Moons 0.130 0.16 0.06 525.0 154.0 0.55 072 510 5669 0 Planets Masses) (AU) 0.630 0.46 0.30 9.17 80.7 0.87 0.43 358 7626 1 3 0.398 0.87 0.77 43.1 106.9 0.76 0.39 265 6814 4 0.497 1.23 1.29 11.4 99.6 0.84 051 211 7272 1.87 2.41 23.8 128.9 1.03 0.34 185 8191 1 0 1.092 Wavelength Outer Solar Mass Distance Orbit Tilt Radius Light System (Earth From Star Period Spin (degrees (Earth Reflectivit Emitted Large Small Radii Planets Masses) (AU) (years) (hours) y (nm) Moons Moons 51749 6.79 16.7 6.5 0.6 11.89 052 32421 3.000 233 27 95 21.59 947 8.17 36.0 5.09 050 57349 0.000 7 3 27 5.75 4791 312.99 12.4 1.8 10.12 0.49 84801 5.000 30 An axis tilt 90 degrees implies that the planet is spinning retrograde (opposite its orbit direction) Reflectivity is the fraction of starlight reflected by the planet back to space The no-greenhouse temperature depends on the albedo and the distance from the star. It may not match the actual surface temperature. The wavelength of light emitted is the peak wavelength of thermal emission from the planet. Use this to calculate temperature Large Moons are defined as having a mass greater than 0.002 Earth masses or 10 22 kg

Explanation / Answer

a. Explain which geological processes have been active on the planet in the past and which of these should still be occurring. Support your answers with the relevant data from your Mystery Solar System table.

Earth’s inner solar system companions, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars, are diverse bodies, each of which provides data critical for understanding the formation and evolution of habitable worlds like our own. These terrestrial (or rocky) planetary bodies have a range of compositions and geologic histories—each is a unique world that reveals information crucial for understanding the past, present, and future of Earth. This chapter focuses on three particular inner bodies, Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. All are essential to understanding how terrestrial planets form and change with time the complex early history of Mercury. Venus, with its greenhouse atmosphere, Earth-like size, and volcanic surface, has been a focus of recent international missions but remains a challenge for in situ exploration. Recent exploration of the Moon has revealed a geochemically complex surface and polar volatiles (e.g., hydrogen or ice), leading to significant unanswered questions about the Earth-Moon system. The study of Mars over the past 15 years has greatly increased our understanding of its history

Over millions and millions of years, the gas and dust particles became attracted to each other by their mutual gravities and began to combine or crash. As larger balls of matter formed, they swept the smaller particles away and eventually cleared their orbits. That led to the birth of Earth and the other eight planets in our Solar System. Since much of the gas ended up in the outer parts of the system, this may explain why there are gas giants — although this presumption may not be true for other solar systems discovered in the universe.

Until the 1990s, scientists only knew of planets in our own Solar System and at that point accepted there were nine planets. As telescope technology improved, however, two things happened. Scientists discovered exoplanets or planets that are outside of our solar system. This began with finding massive planets many times larger than Jupiter, and then eventually finding planets that are rocky — even a few that are close to Earth’s size itself.

The other change was finding worlds similar to Pluto, then considered the Solar System’s furthest planet, far out in our own Solar System. At first, astronomers began treating these new worlds like planets, but as more information came in, the International Astronomical Union held a meeting to better figure out the definition.

“A celestial body that  

(a) is in orbit around the Sun,

(b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape,  

(c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

Jupiter is the behemoth of the Solar System and is believed to be responsible for influencing the path of smaller objects that drift by its massive bulk. Sometimes it will send comets or asteroids into the inner solar system, and sometimes it will divert those away.

Saturn, most famous for its rings, also hosts dozens of moons — including Titan, which has its own atmosphere. Joining it in the outer solar system are Uranus and Neptune, which both have atmospheres of hydrogen, helium, and methane. Uranus also rotates opposite to other planets in the solar system.

The inner planets include Venus (once considered Earth’s twin, at least until its hot surface was discovered); Mars (a planet where liquid water could have flowed in the past); Mercury (which despite being close to the sun, has ice at its poles) and Earth, the only planet known so far to have life.

b. What geological features should be common on the planet’s surface? Explain.

The term can be defined as any physical feature of the earth's surface - or of the rocks exposed at the surface - that is formed by a geologic process. Note that the same definition can be applied to the features of any planet or moon.

Many geologic features influence the shape of the ground's surface and can be described by the perhaps more familiar terms topography, landscapes, or landforms. They are the visible expressions of the relationships between the geologic forces acting to elevate the land surface and those wearing it away.

The term is also used to describe physical features of rocks themselves, usually related to the rock-forming processes to something that has affected the rock's appearance (such as tectonic uplift or bending of rock layers).

The term is not typically used in the context of what a rock is actually made of. For example, while a volcano is a geologic feature, and the lava flows on its flanks are also geologic features, the rock that the lava flows are made of is not a geologic feature. Similarly, a river's delta and sand bars are both geologic features; but the mud and sand they are made of are not. Additionally, the term carries no implication of size. The Himalayan mountain range is a geologic feature, but so are the small ripples of sand you might see in the bed of the Brahmaputra River running at the feet of the mountains.

Ripples created in the sand by the flow of Medano Creek (foreground) are just as much a geologic feature as the gigantic sand dunes (middle) at Great Sand Dunes National Park or the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance.Obviously, it would be impossible to catalog in this lesson all of the geologic features and processes on the planet. So, let's discuss a few more examples to help you get a general idea. With that knowledge, you can delve into specific examples in your particular part of the world.

c. Are there features that should be rare or absent on the planet’s surface? Explain.

The Rare planet hypothesis argues that the evolution of biological complexity requires a host of fortuitous circumstances, such as a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial planet, the advantage of a gas giant guardian like Jupiter and a large natural satellite, conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics, the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, the role of "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts, and whatever led to the appearance of the eukaryote cell, sexual reproduction and the Cambrian explosion of animal, plant, and fungi phyla. The evolution of human intelligence may have required yet further events, which are extremely unlikely to have happened were it not for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago which saw the decline of dinosaurs as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates. In order for a small rocky planet to support complex life. The universe is so vast that it could contain many Earth-like planets. But if such planets exist, they are likely to be separated from each other by many thousands of light years. Such distances may preclude communication among any intelligent species evolving on such planets, which would solve the Fermi paradox.

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