Gas dwarfs into Super-Earths

[stevebowers]

Here's a paper about 'mini-Neptunes' that lose their hydrogen envelopes, becoming potentially 'habitable' superterrestrials (ie with a solid or liquid-water surface that could possibly support life).

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus...src=recsys

This is similar to the process that creates hypothetical chthonian planets, but on a much less dramatic scale.

[Rynn]

I wonder if this could be the ultimate fate of an industrial gas planet; the entire atmosphere stripped off by DWIZs over the centuries to harvest trillions of tonnes of material. The remaining planet could then be terraformed in some manner, unless it's also dismantled.

[stevebowers]

The world Pluton is an example of this kind of 'stripped core'; the light gases from this planet's atmosphere have been stripped, leaving behind the water core, which is frozen on the surface to form a massive icy planet. The terraforming of this world is confined to an equatorial strip.

I'm pretty sure that extracting the atmosphere from such a world would result in a lot of waste heat, so that the surface of the world would not immediately freeze -the initial result would be a hot water surface with a water vapour atmosphere. But if the heat can be extracted (using OTEC technology, for example) then some of this heat could be made available for work.

[Drashner1]

I wonder if this could be the ultimate fate of an industrial gas planet; the entire atmosphere stripped off by DWIZs over the centuries to harvest trillions of tonnes of material. The remaining planet could then be terraformed in some manner, unless it's also dismantled.

In the book Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt, human civilization strips Jupiter down and then terraforms the core in this way (although DWIZs aren't mentioned). Later, human civilization goes extinct and another races evolves into a starfaring civ that goes on to strip down Saturn. Later still, the second race goes extinct and a third races comes along that does the same to Uranus and Neptune.

Todd