How to combine two planets together?
I saw a review on the Steam game page for Universe Sandbox 2 that said there's a way to combine two Planets into one, but I have seen nothing about how to do it.
When I tried it they would just explode. Does anyone know how to combine two planets?
Best Answer
What happens when two objects collide in Universe Sandbox depends on various properties of these objects.
For example: If you try to collide two high-mass stars, the result is often a supernova. However, if you add a much smaller star to a larger one, they will merge together.
If you want to merge two planets into one, then these things will help:
- Make sure that the relative velocity between the two objects is low. Don't launch at 10 km/s, try 0.1 km/s instead. If you want to start the objects far apart, you can put both planets in an intersecting orbit around a star to reduce the relative impact velocity to some degree.
- Have one planet be (far) more massive than the other.
- Use less 'dense' objects. E.g. planets that consist of more Hydrogen and less Iron.
Note that there may be configurations of planet pairs you can think of where you may require more than one of the three points above to be true.
When an object of near-planetary mass or more collides with a rocky planet, the force of the impact will melt the planet's surface, turning it into a hot ball of molten rock and iron and vaporizing the planet's surface liquids. The planet will take a long time to cool down, after which its atmospheric composition and other parameters may have changed. E.g. if you collide an asteroid made of ice with a planet, its sea level may rise.
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Can two planets merge together?
If the cores collide at an angle then the planets may or may not merge, but in all cases a large amount of the gaseous envelope will be lost. Very oblique collisions do not disrupt the planets at all and both would continue on almost the same orbits without losing any mass.Can 2 planets be on the same orbit?
So, strictly speaking, two 'planets' in the same orbit would not be classed as planets. But it is possible for two planet-like bodies to share the same orbit around a central star without colliding: the second object would need to be positioned at a particular point in the first object's gravitational field.Will any planets collide?
Planetary collisions are pretty rare, especially in developed systems like ours. Our solar system is reasonably stable -- not perfectly so, but all of the planets are not likely to hit another large object in the near future. About the worst thing that could happen would be that an asteroid could hit.How close can planets be to each other?
The planets occupy nearly the same orbital plane and on their closest approach come within about 1.2 million miles of each other \u2013 just five times the Earth-moon distance and about 20 times closer to one another than any two planets in our solar system.What If We Combine All The Planets in Our Solar System?
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