Submitted by Aubin_kun t3_11l055w in askscience
Hi everyone !
Basically, I am worldbuilding for a future Tabletop RPG, and I need some informations.
I want to know how much influence does a natural satellite have on the formation of planets, its continents, its landmasses, and all about geography and climate (maybe geology ?). Also, what would happen if a natural satellite suddenly appears around a planet that did not had one ?
This might be a lot of information for one simple answer, so feel free to point me towards article or other papers that can explain it for a non-scientist like me.
Also, maybe you can give me a precise answer based on the context of my world. To be simple, there was Pangea, magic stuff happened, big war against Creator of the Universe, he/she/it decides to punish enemies by throwing them and their city in space, creating a new Mars-like (like red desert planet) satellite directly from the crust of the original Earth-like planet they lived on. This whole process is such a cataclysm that it destroys Pangea and reshapes the lands. I need some kind of clues to know how I can reshape this world and how this new satellite influence this.
Thanks !
BusyDadGaming t1_jba9gjj wrote
The kind of cataclysm you're talking about depends greatly on how much material you're ejecting into space, and also quite a bit on how far away it ends up. You say that it is a city that's getting yeeted out the planetary airlock, though you call it Mars-like based on its climate. That's a huge range. You're going to have to decide where in that size range it falls in order to get any workable details.
If the amount of crust getting cosmically defenestrated is the size of a city, there will be little to no impact on the planet at large. It doesn't matter how far away it ends up in this scenario. It's a small asteroid, too small to fall into a spherical shape, and it's going to need all kinds of magic to have anything to make it habitable, like air or sufficient gravity.
If on the other hand it's the size of Mars, the entire biosphere of the original planet will be utterly destroyed, the surface liquified, and no kind of life will be able to exist there for several million years (which is what actually happened to earth).
You'll need to provide more details.