#but generally speaking 15c is more cool than warm

[sonderwalker]

back with another meta post, this time about Tatooine.

so I saw a post from @misskirby about tatooine’s climate, and I am having thoughts again and so now we are going to try and apply science (again) to star wars hopefully this isn’t as long as the coruscant meta

basically, the post talked about Tatooine’s climate, which I’m going to talk about in a lot more depth here and draw from legends + use some science

so, in legends, Tatooine is a tropical planet, with lots of water (which is where the canyons on the planet come from) but due to wars and climate change it’s become a desert and all of the water has evaporated into space from the fighting.

There’s an inherent problem with that which is that there’s no way that the water would have evaporated, leaving the rest of the atmosphere behind as is. If we go with this original legends explanation, Tatooine should still be a tropical planet.

A while ago, I did some quick math for how much water the planet has, assuming that 1% of the water on the planet is drinkable and there is enough for the human population on the planet. So then, this means that most of the water on the planet is underground, in hard to access spots.

What does this mean about the planet’s climate though?

Tatooine is a desert. like a hot as hell desert. The planet has two suns. It is hot.

But, in the post, someone brings up the fact that deserts are cool at night! Deserts on earth cool off at night- and not all of them do. It entirely depends on the location of the desert- which is brought up in the post as well. Not all deserts cool off at night, some deserts are hot all year round. some places on earth are just hot all year round.

but what about a desert that has two suns?

Tatooine’s suns can be classified as yellow and red dwarfs. yellow ones are like the sun- and red ones are smaller and less stable. they give off a lot of harmful radiation, which means Tatooine has to have a really strong electromagnetic sphere. Which implies the planet has a very large and very active core made out of iron.

but, both of these stars give off heat, so would Tatooine cool off at night?

a day on Tatooine is 34 hours long, and if we assume that for 34 hours, 17 of those hours are spent with some kind of sun exposure, then the surface of the planet is probably reaching temperatures upwards of 45 degrees C, or 113F. Rocks loose heat quicker than water does, but if the rocks are that hot (if not hotter), then how quickly are they losing heat?

the most common mineral that sand is made out of is quartz- which has a pretty low thermal conductivity rate. this means it heats up quickly and loses heat quickly, and allows for heat to pass through quickly. (thermal conductivity is 1.4 W/m °C)

if there’s water under all of that rock, and the water is being heated by the rock, then we can assume some of the heat is being trapped under the surface. Also, since Tatooine has to have an active core in order to keep the planet habitable because of the radiation, the planet itself is going to generate a good amount of heat!

there’s also the fact that Tatooine has an atmosphere that is also trapping in some of the heat the planet recieves, and the planet is receiving more heat than Earth does because there are two stars.

Speaking of stars, red dwarf stars have temperatures around 3,500C and yellow dwarfs get up to around 5,500C, but Tatooine is receiving both of these energy sources at once, meaning that the planet doesn’t get much of a chance to really cool off.

Basically with all of these things combined, Tatooine doesn’t really get very cold at night. It becomes cooler, but not cold. But because of the immense amount of heat coming from the host stars, in combination with the heat that the atmosphere is trapping, and heat that water under the surface is trapping (which was several million liters according to my calculations), and heat the planet produces in geological activity, it’s just hot.

all the time.

additionally, if there isn’t a whole lot of wind that partciuclar night, and the air is super clear, the planet might not really cool off at all, depending on what region you’re in.

Although I would think that at night it would go from being unbearable and deadly to just warm, so again, still a large temperature difference, because I’m talking about a difference of like 15C but still

I think though, if you were at the poles, in the parts that were not exposed to sunlight for any length of time, you might get freezing temperatures, and maybe even ice in permanently shadowed regions.

This post turned into more of a ramble, so let me know if you’d like to see some of the math I was talking about!