Astronomy

Our Universe appears to be expanding and cooling, having originated some 13.8 billion years ago in a hot Big Bang. However, it's plausible that what we see from inside our Universe is simply the result of being inside a black hole that formed from some parent Universe. If the black holes that form in our cosmos give birth to baby Universes, perhaps we arose from the formation of a black hole ourselves.

So, I was looking at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_binary_star_systems

And I want to write a sci-fi story about Non-circumbinary planet in a binary system. (The "S type" shown on that wiki page.)

And although I'm not going hardcore for the "hard" sci-fi, I want to get at least a vaguely plausible idea of how day/night and year cycles might go for such a planet. If only so I can get an idea of how I need to set up my calendar, and brainstorm on how animal/plantlife might evolve differently if the day/night cycle and seasonal cycle is different enough from Earth.

Are there any tools out there where I can either find an existing binary star system out there and put a hypothetical planet around one of them and get a visual of how sunlight from the two stars might play out over the planet circling one of them, or where I can just straight-up plop stellar/planetary masses down and it'll let me play with orbits and such?

Back in the day there wasn't, but I feel like someone might have evolved some sort of toy that'll let me do this when I wasn't looking. I just don't know where to start.

Citations and links to related videos on the video description.

Summary generated with claude.ai from the video transcription:

The 'final parsec problem' refers to the fact that the math predicts supermassive black holes at the centers of merging galaxies should stall at around 1 parsec separation and never actually merge. This contradicts observations suggesting supermassive black holes do merge over time. The problem arises because at around 1 parsec separation, the black holes have cleared out all stars/gas so can't lose more energy to get even closer. Gravitational waves only help below 0.01 pc. The upcoming LISA gravitational wave detector should detect mergers and help solve this problem - either the math is wrong and mergers happen, or mergers don't happen and the math is right.

OG toot by sundogplanets@mastodon.social