Furthermore, tidal locking is dependent on oceans and atmosphere, and can take many billions of years to occur, or even never. Mercury has plenty of time to tidally lock but is in a 3:2 resonance with the sun. There are even other options; for example, moons of gas giants within the habitable zone would be tidally locked to their primary and thus have a day-night cycle.
I am deeply skeptical of that "recent research", which AFAIK is "computer models, where we have zero capability to verify the computer models against even a single data point".
The incentives to keep kicking the computer model until it provides something publishable, with no countervailing force provided by real data to be explained by the model, are just too strong for me to take that too seriously.
If physics has some bias they polish their models towards, it's on the direction of repeating the findings of the previous ones, not of changing them.
Obviously, one shouldn't blindly accept them without experimental confirmation, but one shouldn't also be wildly pessimistic in believing calculations grounded in three centuries worth of validated equations.
But these atmospheres have to stable across cosmological scales in a highly iterative, chaotic environment. There is a mathematical lower bound on the rate such simulations must leak bits as a result of those things. I don't think we have enough bits of real information to make up for that, as it would take rather a lot.
Against the mathematical argument, I set the human argument that, like I said, there's all sorts of incentives to report the one simulation that produced the result that there may be an atmosphere and maybe it could even sustain life! That's a lot of high-profile articles and probably a promotion for getting my department some public attention. Even if hundreds of other simulations all result in "Yeah, the atmosphere freezes out".
Between the math saying we can't really expect this sort of simulation to contain meaningful information and the human factors involved, I can't put a lot of confidence in a model which can't be validated against real data.
I do find it amazing how people who probably think they're really in favor of science and support it will jump up to defend a methodology that literally runs off of zero data. Can someone explain the scientific process to me clearly that involves having no data at any point?
I have no objection to computer models; I object to computer models that can't be checked against data.
Cosmologists run a lot of models, to do things like try to determine the effects of dark matter on the universe. Such models are intrinsically problematic since they have to have resolution on the order of hundreds or thousands of lightyears on a side, or have to work with universes much smaller than the real one, or something that means the simulation is by necessity literally several dozen orders of magnitude smaller than the real universe (consider both the timestep and spatial dimensions).
But they can check the result by looking up in the sky and seeing if it matches. This allows them to overcome the problematic nature of the models and use them to say real things.
One wonders what exciting cosmological papers proposing all sorts of amazing and outlandish theories as a result of some computer model of the universe have been suppressed by the fact that they didn't correspond to the sky at all. I guarantee you that some very amazing simulations have been run that produced incredible results of great interest, whose only crime was that they completely failed to match the universe.
We don't have a tidally locked planet that has an active atmosphere in our solar system to look at.
But that shouldn't affect the day/night in this case right? Since we are talking about planets not satellites of planets and they are light sources not just reflecting light from the star. Can you please correct where I am wrong?
The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, which is why it has a dark side.
There is a far side.
It's dark like the darknet is dark... Occluded.
Edit: Archgoon is right, the photos were taken from the orbiting module, so a rise happened.
But our thoughts about the effects of tidal lock on the emergence of life is little more than philosophy, having only one datapoint to extrapolate from, at that one not being tidal locked.
As a planet gets closer and closer to it's star, this gets more and more pronounced and all the various deformations and instabilities begin to favor braking the planet rather then it continuing to spin.
Even if the ocean is exposed, we now have the time it takes for 1. the planet to become tidally locked due to tidal forces, 2. the atmosphere to be stripped away, 3. the ocean to evaporate. That might be plenty of time for higher lifeforms to develop.