Exoplanet Discoveries and Updates

[iancampbell]

I'm assuming that this planet is denser than Earth, and has lost some of its crustal mass in an earlier collision (or several).

Hmm, yeah, Hermeans and Ferrinians need to either be merged or separated distinctly. I say Ferrinians are those so-called 'cannonballs' with a ridiculous iron fraction of like over 80% mass or so, as described. It seems very difficult to form one.

Yes, the Grue Brothers could have been Antarctican before the Great Expulsion.

This is a great idea. Although Antarctican cultures have mostly vanished due to the Technocalypse, remnants of it could be present in the form of diasporas or revivalists, although weathering the Sundering I think some information they have about the pioneers of what would become their land might've been wrong. A few mistakes in the form of missing names, fictional names, and altered names should make for a nice touch, in my opinion.

I think that "cannonball" planets are possible to form in at least one way, which I saw in a really old Poul Anderson story. "Mirkheim", I think. Very simply, a perfectly normal planet subjected to a nearby supernova and all but an iron core is boiled off. In that story, it was worth exploiting as a source of superheavy elements.

Another way for something like this to happen is a fairly normal Jovian which is perturbed out of its normal orbit into a star-grazing one and most of its mass similarly boiled off.