Talk:Ice planet
Latest comment: 8 years ago by JorisvS in topic Characteristics and habitability
 | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
.jpg){kind=small}
 |
This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.
Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. | Reporting errors |
Characteristics and habitability edit
"Many ice planets likely have subsurface oceans, warmed by internal heat or tidal forces from another nearby body." Whoever wrote that appears to be confusing ice planets with ice moons. Excepting cases of double planets / large moons, such bodies would presumably not be subject to much in the way of tidal forces, unlike icy moons orbiting gas giants, unless said planets were orbiting their parent star very closely, which would make it unlikely they would be frozen. Of course, many of them would still likely be warmed by internal heat. Secret Snelk (talk) 09:31, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
- Its phrasing can definitely be improved, but there is physically little real distinction between moons and planets. Moons normally have some amount of tidal heating, but planets can also be tidally heated (if they have a sizable moon or if it's a double). And internal heat is typically an important contributor anyway, which becomes more significant if the body is bigger. --JorisvS (talk) 15:35, 28 January 2016 (UTC)