- Evil Johnny
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Posted by: MadNinja95
Gas giants are normally very light so it could be much bigger than reach but would orbit around it becouse reach is denser.
The "gas giant" could have been captured by reach in the past making the gas giant a moon and a planet.
Wrong. Gas giants are less dense, true, but are... giant. Saturn's mass is in the 10^26 power, while Earth's in the 10^24 one, that's quite a difference, Saturn weights like 100 times more than Earth. And density has nothing to do with gravity, but mass. If that gas giant is anything like Saturn and Reach anything like Earth, it's pretty obvious Reach would be in orbit around the gas giant. You'll never see a gas giant acting as a moon. From what I gather, all gas planets are giant, and all non-gas planets are much, much smaller. I guess gravity wouldn't be strong enough to keep all the gas together if there'd be less of it, at least, it wouldn't keep together and act like a planet at all.
Posted by: KritikalAugustus
I'm assuming this is what you're looking for
Basically, it only looks like a gas giant because 1) Its extremely close in relation to the ships that are in combat and 2) it possesses an atmosphere (which explains why it appears to be made of gas)
/thread
Except gravity doesn't work like this. Stellar objects can't be in an orbit that close, it would fall into it. That, and the other moon would be too tiny otherwise, particularly that it is seen IN FRONT of the gas giant, meaning that the other object would be damn tiny, thus it couldn't get into orbit unless someone put put it there. And the definition of atmosphere is about possessing a layer of gas, ie. gas giants have an atmosphere. So something having an atmosphere means jack about its nature. Plus, a lot of atmospheres can be seen through as if there was none. This means nothing per se, but it's pretty obvious that even if Bungie didn't intended it to be a planet, they did everything in order to make Reach being it's moon what would happen IRL.
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[Edited on 04.16.2011 5:16 PM PDT]