I threw together this totally-not-Star-Wars-related gif because Jay6553 has launched a new project, Galaxies: Star Wars Stories. It's a fanfic series (I think that's what it's called) with original characters and snazzy 3D art. So go check it out!
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Rana is a supercriminal who has risen to the upper echelon of Triton's carnivorous underworld, but in the process has made powerful enemies in Neptune's High Council. Rana is pursuing a government freight ship carrying a mysterious cargo – a destructive device known as Project Rahu (“Sun Eater”). Jetta has helped her track down its last known location: the freighter disappeared in the vicinity of dwarf planet Salacia, within roaming range of the notorious Salacian pirates who control the lawless region. What exactly Rana intends to do with Rahu when she gets her hands on it is still not known.
As far as obscure outer space locations go, planet Salacia is about as obscure as they get. Still, I happened to come across a Youtube video where Anton Petrov briefly visits the dwarf planet using the popular space simulation program Space Engine. Aaaand the Space Engine version of Salacia looks nothing like my version.
So, what gives? Why is their version all oblong and flattened, while my version is spherical? Are they wrong, or do I need to rethink my design for the enigmatic ice ball?
Well, the reason Space Engine shows Salacia as an oblong shape is not because it's supposed to be an asteroid. Salacia is easily massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium, which should force it into a spherical shape. However, Salacia does have a very fast spin (it completes a full rotation about every six hours), and that spin causes a planet to flatten out on top and bulge at the equator, much like a twirling pizza dough flattens out into a disc. Dwarf planet Haumea is probably the most extreme example of this in our solar system, but there are others out there with extreme equatorial bulges, like planet Varuna. All planets are at least slightly oblate.
So, what about Salacia? Well, we don't have any good pictures of Salacia unfortunately, and NASA won't be visiting it any time soon, so the best I can do is compare it with other similar objects in our solar system that we do have good imaging on. The closest size matches would be some of the large moons around our gas giants, but those all have very slow rotations, often synchronized with their orbit, so that seems to be a dead end. Ceres is a closer match; it's just a little bit bigger than Salacia and takes 9 hours to rotate, and it's very spherical. So that helps my case a little bit. But it's not very rigorous.
The only other thing I can do is try to calculate the equatorial velocity of Salacia and see whether it's closer to bulgy worlds like Haumea, or to spherical ones like Ceres. Salacia has a diameter of 854 kilometers and rotates once every 6.09 hours, so that gives us a velocity of 140.23 kilometers per hour. Comparing that to Haumea (393.3 kph) and Ceres (106.34 kph), it looks like Salacia is much closer to Ceres. So, it's probably round, though it could be a little bit bulgy, depending on its composition. So for now, I don't think I need to make any drastic changes.
Okay, that's all for now folks! I'll see you in the hopefully not so distant future!
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