#roche limit

The Roche Limit draws near...

Happy 31st, Kirby! To celebrate another year of this gumball, Mike-O and I helped our boy SakuraWindsS draw not one, but two covers for one more Forgotten Land remix, arguably one of the best final boss suites of Kirby's to date and a favorite for all of us.

I'm so stoked getting these done and to finally see and hear this again in the wild. I love this time of year

Vocab time!

AKA...

Edouard Roche – Scientist of the Day

Édouard Albert Roche, a French mathematician and astronomer, was born Oct. 17, 1820.  

The Roche limit is the distance a satellite has to be away from the object it’s orbiting to keep tidal forces from being strong enough to overcome its own gravity. There are two basic limits: one for rigid bodies which I’ve represented as a red hemisphere and one for fluid bodies which I’ve represented as a yellow hemisphere. It’s a simple calculation for the rigid body Roche limit, and for the approximation Roche himself came up with that I’m using for the fluid body calculation. In both cases the size of the Roche limit depends only on the radius of the thing being orbited and the ratio of densities between the two objects.

The basic types of asteroid’s I’m dealing with are, from lightest to densest, C, S, and M or Chondrite, Stony, and Metallic. At left I have an M orbiting a C, at right a C orbiting an M, and in the center any asteroid orbiting an asteroid of its own type.

Roche Limit: Clandestiny #1 (2015)