TIAMAT / THE CELESTIAL ATLAS / 01
A fast shadow. A familiar face. A pale disc. A distant point of light. Meet the four companions of Tiamat, and discover what they move beneath its skies.
One day lasts 40 Earth hours.
One stellar orbit spans 1,324 Earth years.
The moons keep a different time.
01 / THE ORBITAL OBSERVATORY
Select a moon. Advance time. Watch four independent rhythms cross.
02 / WHAT THE MOONS MOVE
Uruk supplies most of the pull. Kaluk moves quickly enough to keep changing the balance.
A planar, circular-orbit illustration of the tidal field. The deformation is exaggerated; it is not a prediction of sea level.
Kaluk contributes about 31%. Aksu and Eak add much smaller corrections. Aligned directions reinforce the tidal field; directions at right angles partly cancel it.
Using the orbital explorer’s time.
Ocean depth, coastlines and basins shape the actual tides. The moons may modulate fractures already under stress. Internal heat remains the engine of volcanism.
03 / TWO VERY DIFFERENT CLOCKS
Tiamat’s immense seasons last across generations. Its moons complete thousands of revolutions while the planet moves around Takbiru and Takmat.
of daylight per 40-hour Cycle
Idealized point-source geometry with a fixed 40° tilt; no atmospheric refraction, terrain or binary wobble. Flux is not temperature.
Southern summer falls near closest approach. The orbit now adds only about an 8.4% nearest-to-farthest flux contrast; the 40° tilt dominates the seasonal geometry. Lunar tides still follow their short rhythms; local coastlines determine what the water does.
Tiamat moves more slowly when farthest away. Local thaw and persistent ice depend on clouds, oceans and atmospheric heat transport. Aksu’s association with thaw is cultural; each lunar orbit does not cause a thaw.
Lunar forces persist through all eight great Mareas. Ice, water depth and coastal shape can alter the response, but no universal seasonal tide height is established.
04 / A SHADOW ACROSS TAKBIRU
A conjunction is not necessarily an eclipse. Alignment must work in three dimensions.
Angular sizes at mean lunar distances. Uniform stellar disc; no limb darkening. Takbiru’s radius is assumed to be approximately 770 solar radii (100,000 solar luminosities at 3,700 K).
THE GEOMETRY OF AN ECLIPSE
Under this stellar-radius assumption, no individual moon covers the full star. The roughly equatorial lunar paths are tilted relative to Tiamat’s stellar orbit, so the right alignment does not happen at every new moon.
This demonstrates a possible transit geometry, not an eclipse date or a forecast for a location.
05 / THE TIME PEOPLE LIVE BY
The rotation of Tiamat sets the daily clock.
A traditional civil unit. Uruk now completes a physical orbit in about 4.44 Cycles.
Nine civil months. Eak’s Awakening opens the year ceremonially, whether or not the moon is visible that night.
06 / A WORLD BETWEEN STARS
Tiamat changed stellar homes about 120,000 Earth years ago. In the adopted reconstruction, a rare encounter transferred the planet and its compact lunar system together.
BEFORE THE ENCOUNTER
The planet orbited its original star at roughly 1 AU. Its moons already belonged to it; their comparatively close orbits made retention possible in the selected encounter.
The adopted natal star has 0.8 solar masses. Its thermal state is an input, not a computed stellar-evolution track.
An isolated, static star cannot permanently capture a passing planet without an energy exchange. Here, the natal star and a visiting star participate in a multiple-body encounter. Both depart unbound, carrying away energy while Tiamat remains bound to the binary.
The outer moon lies about 599,000 km from Tiamat’s centre after the encounter. All four remain outside the rocky Roche limit and the synchronous radius. Their survival was tested directly through the encounter and for 1,000 years together.
A direct five-body calculation followed the planet, both binary stars and both departing stars, with prescribed stellar mass loss.
A direct nine-body calculation included mutual gravity and Tiamat’s rotational flattening. No moon was lost and no lunar orbits crossed in the tested solution.
A separate orbit-averaged lunar model followed longer-term variations; tidal estimates bounded slow drift. This is not a full nine-body integration across 120,000 years.
The present reference orbit has a semimajor axis of about 323.87 AU and eccentricity near 0.02. It remains a long, almost circular journey of about 1,324 Earth years. Takbiru’s adopted luminosity rises from 95,000 to 100,000 solar luminosities over the reconstructed interval.
The 40° tilt preserves long hemispheric seasons and polar day and night. Eight equal angular intervals would span roughly 160–172 Earth years each. These are geometric intervals, not newly named civil or cultural boundaries.
The transfer is rapid on evolutionary timescales. The adopted history no longer requires millions of years as a dark, wandering planet. The climate calculations still allow severe regional heat and ecological disruption; surviving moons do not prove a surviving biosphere.
WHAT REMAINS CONDITIONAL
The climate design uses about 1.42 bar of atmosphere, roughly 2% carbon dioxide, 65% ocean cover and a 200-metre active ocean layer. It requires clouds to become more reflective as warm regions heat up. A latitude-based energy model retains some moderate-temperature bands under that assumed response.
The cloud response has not been established with a three-dimensional climate model. The stellar evolution history is prescribed rather than generated by a detailed stellar model. Atmospheric chemistry, radiation protection and biological survival still require specialist validation. This page presents an adopted fictional model with numerical support, not a fully validated habitable planet.
In the nominal transfer test, latitude-band means ranged from about 242 to 344 K (−31 to 71°C). At least about 19% of the modeled surface remained within the selected 273–310 K band at any one time. A shallower, 50-metre active layer reduced that minimum to about 14%. These moving latitude bands are not demonstrated safe habitats or guarantees of access to water.
The calculations use a separate simplified energy-balance model with interpolated HEXTOR radiation tables and an assumed cloud law. They do not predict local weather, humidity, long-term water loss, species survival or the location of refuges. Fixed weak cloud protection did not produce the same acceptable outcome.
The moon animation uses circular paths and post-encounter reference periods, with illustrative starting angles. It omits small eccentricities, inclinations and perturbations. The season and eclipse explorers are geometric demonstrations, not dated forecasts. Coastal tide heights remain uncomputed.
Explore the adopted suns → · Explore seasonal illumination →