Exoplanetscape 19

All of my other exoplanetary excursions can be experienced in my DA "Paleo & Sci Illo" gallery: [link]

This is the surface of Michelin a "super-Earth" with 4.5 times the mass of our own world. Its predominantly nitrogen atmosphere weighs down at the surface with a pressure greater than the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The shapes that look like old truck tires are in fact a "forest" of primary producer life forms. Here "trees" are as flat as poker chips.

Michelin orbits a red dwarf whose binary companion is a brown dwarf. This planet always shows the same face to its host bodies. Michelin's year is a whole integer ratio with the period of the brown dwarf. Michelin's orbit is highly excentric, looping rosettes around the common gravitational center of the system. It preceses as many degrees in a single brief orbit as the Earth describes in several thousand years.

art & text (c) John P. Alexander