Vulcan has no moon

[honeybee]

Okay, thanks to Linda and others, I've heard that Vulcan has no moon. At least, that's what Spock says in an episode of TOS.

In my head, Vulcan has always had two moons. It's burned in there, and I think that must be from ST: The Motion Picture, which has a skyscape of Vulcan clearly showing two moon-like objects in the sky. These were apparently removed for the director's cut. But my guess is that given the number of times my hard-core Trekkie brother watched that movie when I was little (he had a bootleg VHS, can you believe it?) - that's where I got my notion that Vulcan had more than one moon.

But I think I've settled on the fanon notion that Vulcan has moonlike objects in the sky that are dwarf planets of some kind that function as moons. Given our moon's importance to tides and gravity, I'm skeptical that intelligent life could evolve on a planet with no moons at all - unless some kind of object functioned as a moon.

Anyway, I now have to revise the ending of Dusk based on this idea that Vulcan has dwarf planets orbiting nearby that look like moons. I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts?

I'd be curious to know if and how Vulcans divide up their years and when magazines publish if they have no moon.

[WarpGirl]

According to Memory Alpha...

According to Gene Roddenberry, James Blish, and multiple background sources, the Vulcan system is the star 40 Eridani A.
In Gene Roddenberry's novelization of The Motion Picture he indicated that nine Vulcan seasons were equal to 2.8 Earth years. This would make Vulcan's year 456 ± 33 Earth days long.
Vulcan was also mentioned as a small note on a very large star chart graphic created for TNG: "Conspiracy". It was the image behind the chair in the room where Dexter Remmick was killed. It appears to be near Memory Alpha and Sirius.
Vulcan was the name of the Roman god of metalworking as well as the name given to a supposed planet Vulcan which was once thought to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun.
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, Ronald D. Moore mentions that the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine writers toyed with making Vulcan the planet that was conquered by the Dominion in "In the Pale Moonlight". However, they decided to go with Betazed, as Vulcan carried "too much weight".
The Star Trek novel Spock's World offers the explanation that the "moon" appearing in the Vulcan sky in "Yesteryear" and the original cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was actually the sister planet of Vulcan, called T'Khut. This theory is widespread in other non-canonical works like Star Trek Maps, Star Trek: Star Charts and The Worlds of the Federation.
[edit] Appearances

[Aquarius]

T'Khut has also been mentioned in several of the profic novels.

I think her first appearance was in TAS, which I think is the "Yesteryear" reference in WG's post.

[honeybee]

So, I'm guessing while technically not a "moon" - T'Khut would function very similarly to a moon as far as gravity and tides go.

Do they share an orbit around the star or do they orbit around each other?

[Aquarius]

It's been a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time since I read about the explanation...I think it was in The Making of Star Trek by James Blish, but I could be mistaken about that because with the passage of time, all the stuff I read back in my middle school days is running together. I don't think they orbit each other, but I believe that the way it was explained is that T'Khut has a funky orbit that brings it close enough to Vulcan every so often to fill up the sky. If you remember other moons, they may, in fact, be T'Khut's moons.

If Alelou sees this, she'll probably be able to tell us more. She seems to know The Making of Star Trek inside and out.

[Aquarius]

Double-post, sorry.

I found this at Memory Beta, which is a repository of non-canon Trek factoids. The entry references two Trek novels I've read and love well, and it mentions the eccentric orbit thingy thing I was talking about, so it might've actually been in one of those that I read about that, as I read The Vulcan Academy Murders in middle school or early high school.

Any way, I think that this explanation was come up with in order to retcon the appearance of a moon in TAS and STTMP in light of Spock clearly stating that Vulcan had no moons.

[Alelou]

I thought Vulcan had two moons or one huge bright moon or something that causes it to not get very dark at night. Probably this arises from BnB and his theory of poor Vulcan eyesight in the dark. Seems to me I remember seeing pictures of Vulcan with a big thing hanging claustrophically close in the sky, too, but I'm kind of vague on it.

In the new movie, if Old Spock is clearly watching the destruction of Vulcan from the surface of Delta Vega with his bare eyes, that certainly suggests that Delta Vega is either a moon or a planet that is so close they may need air traffic control to get involved. (Or it could mean that the movie is taking artistic liberties from canon fast and furiously.)

I don't think James Blish wrote The Making of Star Trek. He was an English scifi author who wrote the novelizations (or what I would call perfunctory 'short-storizations') before he'd even seen the show. It must have been a very odd assignment for him to work on.

Yeah, he definitely didn't write it. It was Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. (Which probably means it was mostly Stephen but Gene wanted half the royalties.) http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek

[honeybee]

Ugh. So, there's no consistency on this whatsoever! Although, it seems that whether it has moons or not, there are moon-like thingys that appear in the sky once and awhile.

I read another explanation somewhere that Vulcan has satellites but they are too small and their orbits too inconsistent to be called a "moon".

As long as their is SOME explanation of how gravity and tides work and when Vulcans pay their bills, I'm cool.

[Aquarius]

Like I said, the passage of time had clearly dulled the memory. I remember Blish's name being on like almost EVERYTHING Trek I owned at the time.

I remeber the explanation of T'Khut's orbit accounting for the "catastrophically close" appearance.

In doing further research on Wikipedia, I think I was thinking of the Alan Dean Foster animated series adaptations. I didn't own those; a kid who rode my bus to school named Chad lent his copies to me. Any way, that's where I personally remember my first exposure to T'Khut. That may also contain the explanation about the orbit.

[Aquarius]

Ugh. So, there's no consistency on this whatsoever! Although, it seems that whether it has moons or not, there are moon-like thingys that appear in the sky once and awhile.

I read another explanation somewhere that Vulcan has satellites but they are too small and their orbits too inconsistent to be called a "moon".

As long as their is SOME explanation of how gravity and tides work and when Vulcans pay their bills, I'm cool.

Well, what we're clearly dealing with is a continuity error. Spock clearly states in TOS, which aired before any of this other stuff came out, that Vulcan has no moon. Then TAS comes along and shows us something...then STTMP does as well--whether or not the special effects people knew about T'Khut when they developed the skyscape, who knows, but what we do know is that for a planet that has no moon, some kind of explanation needed to be come up with in order to explain what looked like, well, MOONS in the sky.

[Alelou]

Actually, not having a moon could help explain a seven-year mating cycle as opposed to our own generally 28-day mating cycles. Maybe T'Khut or whatever it is has an irregular orbit that brings it close to Vulcan every seven years ... oh boy, the whole planet would go nuts at once ... but they'd be so calm and collected for the rest of the time! Ideal conditions for logic to flourish...? Crazy nutcases who do insane things and then feel remorse and try to use logic to get their shit together, at least for the next 7 years?

Not having a moon wouldn't affect gravity much. The gigantic mass of the planet you're on is what matters.

Foster did a much, much better job than Blish, but then he had a heck of a lot more to go on. I liked his books much better than TAS, actually. In fact, after that I read some of his own work for awhile.

[honeybee]

I think we can all agree that a "certain time of the month" only coming around every seven years would be a good thing.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

From my notes on Diane Duane's Spock's World Vulcan (or T'Khasi) has a twin planet (T'Khut) and they orbit each other. I'm not sure but T'Khut may have moons, which might explain the other celestial bodies seen in TMP.

My notes also mentions that in Jean Lorrah's novels the twin planet T'Kuht has a very eccentric orbit, with a perivulcanum (?) every seven years.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Not having a moon wouldn't affect gravity much. The gigantic mass of the planet you're on is what matters.

No, but it would stabilize the rotation and not make the planet wobble too much. I just saw a documentary about Mars and it mentioned that one of the reasons Mars lost much of its atmoshpere and liquid water was that it didn't have a larger moon to make it more stable. The lack of a larger body also caused the interior of the planet to not move around as much, thus no magnetic field to speak of, and thus not much protection from solar radiation.

[Alelou]

Not having a moon wouldn't affect gravity much. The gigantic mass of the planet you're on is what matters.

No, but it would stabilize the rotation and not make the planet wobble too much. I just saw a documentary about Mars and it mentioned that one of the reasons Mars lost much of its atmoshpere and liquid water was that it didn't have a larger moon to make it more stable. The lack of a larger body also caused the interior of the planet to not move around as much, thus no magnetic field to speak of, and thus not much protection from solar radiation.

Huh. I had no idea. I would have thought adding a moon to the mix would increase wobbling, not decrease it. I'm sure it's more complex than I'm understanding, but it's weird to think that excessive wobbling would cause a planet to lose atmosphere and water on the one hand while excessive stillness in the core would cause it to lack magnetic fields. Must be very different kinds of movement.

I know I read Spock's World a million years ago, so maybe I absorbed that seven year thing from there.