Shammah

**Shammah** is the third and brightest planet of the Judah system. It's thick atmosphere is filled with incredibly rare and reflective noble gases, bouncing almost all of the light it receives from it's parent star back into space. Despite receiving less than 1% of light from it's sun, Shammah is incredibly hot with a balmy 140 degrees celsius surface temperature. Heavy amounts of carbon dioxide, nitrous dioxide, methane, and sulfur hexaflouride gases swallow and bounce the little bit of light they let through from the surface to the atmosphere and back to the surface again, cooking the rocky planet in a runaway greenhouse effect.

The core of the planet is incredibly tectonically active, adding to the greenhouse effect problem as it belches out even more nitrogen and methane into the atmosphere from large volcanoes and geysers. The entire surface is coated in a thick layer of ash and sulfur, erasing the smaller geographical features in a blanket of red-tan dust.

The atmosphere of Shammah is incredibly volatile with winds reaching speeds of over 300 km/h. The upper atmosphere is a plentiful source of blue-green xenon and argon gas, rare elements in the Judah system. It would appear that early in the system's formation the young Shammahn proto-planet consumed nearly all of the xenon and argon in Judah's circumstellar disk, leaving little to none for the rest of the planets of the system.

Shammah has only one naturally occurring satellite: the moon Asa. Asa is a small, irregularly shaped moon in an unstable, eccentric orbit and will one day crash into Shammah.

## Surface

With an atmospheric pressure of over 3 million pascals, a human being standing on the surface of Shammah would feel the weight of over 200 kilograms per square inch, making it difficult, if not impossible, to traverse the terrain unaided. However, if one could stand on the surface of Shammah, they would witness a terrifying and inhospitable environment.

Deserts of thick ash and sulfur cover the surface for deeper than a kilometer in some places, filling caves and caverns with reddish-tan, almost pink, dust. Beneath the blanket of ash the planet is composed of primarily calcium sulfate rock, nickel, and zinc. Mountains and large rocks that manage to protrude from the ashen sulfuric blanket are tan, silver, and dirty white in color.

Volcanoes pock the surface and geysers hide under the planet's ash layer. The surface is almost continually active with an eruption happened somewhere at any given time.

Enormous pink and yellow clouds completely cover the sky, backlight by the green-blue haze of the xenon-argon rich upper atmosphere. Thunderstorms are common, smashing lightning down to the surface. Windstorms swoop down from the upper atmosphere, blowing mountainous storms of sulfuric ash across the near-featureless plains. They redistribute the ash and block out the sun for what can be years at a time.

## Moon

Shammah's only moon, Asa, is small and irregularly shape, not large enough for it's gravity to pull it's material into a sphere. The moon barely has even a 60 kilometer radius. It is a remnant of the impact between Shammah's former moons Elhanan and Heleb, coalesced from material left over from the catastrophe. One day the moon will be overcome by Shammah's gravity and will plunge into the planet, super heating Shammah and increasing it's geologic activity.