Vulcan's red sky

[Herbert1]

Has it been established why Vulcan has a red sky? Is this due to dust particles in the atmosphere? Possibly from volcanic eruptions?

Is the 40 Eridani A system the accepted location for the planet Vulcan? 40 Eridani A is an orange main-sequence dwarf of spectral type K1.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Has it been established why Vulcan has a red sky? Is this due to dust particles in the atmosphere?

This was the sky over Sydney, and most of eastern Australia, on 23 Sept 2009:


Red sky by Therin of Andor, on Flickr

It finally returned to blue by later afternoon. Ironically, it happened during a TrekBBS debate that JJ got it wrong by making Vulcan's sky blue in ST 2009.

 

[F. King Daniel]

T'Pol said that Vulcan "sometimes" has blue skies in "Strange New World". It was yellow in "Yesteryear"

Seasonal? An after-effect of sandstorms? An advanced weather net with RGB sliders in a control room somewhere?

 

[Idran]

T'Pol said that Vulcan "sometimes" has blue skies in "Strange New World". It was yellow in "Yesteryear"

Seasonal? An after-effect of sandstorms? An advanced weather net with RGB sliders in a control room somewhere?

RGB? Nah, the Vulcans are all about HSL.

 

[Therin of Andor]

An advanced weather net with RGB sliders in a control room somewhere?

The weird thing about our red dust day in Australia, the red colour in the sky had the effect of cancelling out the colour blue from our surroundings, so it was weird enough looking up into the horizon, but everywhere else we looked, the normal spectrum was totally off!

 

[Ronald Held]

in TOS it was red/orange. the same in "Yesteryear" and the trilogy in the 4th season of ENT, AFAIR

 

[Sandoval]

I'll go with 'because it looks alien'.

 

[JD]

I'm reading Spock's World right now, and in the last history chapter whole planet was burned by it's star. Could that have something to do with the red sky?

 

[rfmcdpei]

I'm reading Spock's World right now, and in the last history chapter whole planet was burned by it's star. Could that have something to do with the red sky?

It would have made the planet a desert, hence more dusty and more likely to have red skies. I wonder how the proto-Vulcans could have survived it--if they were indigenous to Vulcan and not stranded Sargonian refugees, that is.

There's actually some real basis for Vulcan to have been superheated, not in 40 Eridani A but in 40 Eridani B. The whole system is about five billion years old, orange dwarf A and red dwarf C and white dwarf B. B is a very young white dwarf, though, and very hot. The current speculation is that 40 Eridani B went off the main sequence 100 million years ago, evolving from a star not unlike Procyon in luminosity and mass to becoming a stellar ember, in the process shedding perhaps half of its mass to nearby space.

On average, A--which supports Vulcan--is 418 AU, or about 2.4 light days, from the B/C barycenter. That's some distance, maybe even a survivable distance, but any Earth-like world in A's habitable zone is going to be baked by B's shed stellar plasma.

 

[Nerys Myk]

If Mars can have blue skies, then why can't Vulcan?

 

[Timo]

...If the sky color changes are due to extensive, indeed planetwide dust clouds, what implications does this carry for the planet's water balance?

If Vulcan has atmospheric moisture (and TAS and ENT do show some clouds), how does this interact with the dust clouds? Are sky-clearing rains a seasonal event or a random occurrence? Does Vulcan have bodies of open water (say, extremely saline shallow seas, possibly seasonal ones)? What does all the dust fallout do to such bodies?

Which books have mentioned bodies of water, or the explicit lack thereof?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

One shouldn't expect Vulcan to have a uniform climate planetwide. You could have a red sky over ShiKahr and a blue sky over, say, Vulcana Regar at the same time, depending on local meteorological conditions.

 

[Timo]

...However, we do get a look from the above in many cases, and it indeed is as uniform as many of the Martian sandstorms. Indeed, the color of the entire planet changes from episode to episode, with homogeneous reds and yellows possibly suggesting dense cloud cover, but with more differentiated reds (with overlaid thin clouds) from ENT indicating that the soil itself is predominantly of that color, too.

No doubt the climate on Vulcan is differentiated by latitude and by proximity to mountain ranges and the like, but the atmosphere-coloring dust storms seem to be a fairly homogeneous global phenomenon.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

I tend to agree with Timo, although I have not thought to crudely model Vulcan's climate.

 

[vegaslover62]

Martian soil is red because of rust.

 

[DrBashir]

Vulcan's sky is blue now. Deal with it.

 

[Kertrats47]

Actually, I'm pretty sure Vulcan's sky doesn't exist anymore...

 

[DrBashir]

True, I guess it`s black. Totally black.

However, if we return to the prime universe, it`ll be blue. Unless thay change it again.

 

[Kertrats47]

They didn't change it... it can be blue at times, as T'Pol said in Enterprise. Sometimes it's red. Earth's sky changes colour based on the time of day, where in the world you are, etc. Vulcan's sky is predominantly red (it seems), but "gets this blue" "at times."

 

[Christopher]

^Yes. Yes, yes, yes. When I flew out from Cincinnati to New York the other day, there was cloudy, rainy weather over the entire intervening span of the country. When I returned four days later, the weather over the same expanse was mostly clear. Atmospheres change. This is a no-brainer. Vulcan's sky was red in "Amok Time" and yellow in "Yesteryear" and orange in The Voyage Home and blue in the new movie, and there's no reason why that should be any more surprising than the way our sky changes from day to day. If anything, it's far more sensible than assuming that an entire planet has exactly the same, unaltering conditions over its entire surface in perpetuity. Planets with atmospheres simply do not work that way.