How fast does your planet spin, and is there a sizable climate difference between day and night?
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)It wouldn't necessarily work out that all life needed to do that. In such a planet, near the equator would be a "goldilocks zone" of perpetual twilight, neither freezing cold nor burning hot. Of course, there'd be some nasty weather (the temperature differential between the summer and winter would be huge, which means really strong, virtually constant winds from the summer-side to the winter-side).
Also, if they're going into suspended animation due to the cold during winter, what do they do during the summer while they should be burning to death?
edited 29th Mar '11 7:29:37 AM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.^Erm, yes?
^^Well, I guess some species would continuously migrate in that area. I didn't think about the hottest part of the summer. Perhaps they burrow underground, or something.
^^^There's not really any difference, given you'll be at almost the exact same distance from the sun. It completes it's rotation in a little over 80 hours.
^^^^The star is a main sequence, a little bit bigger than our sun. The orbit is about between where Earth and Mars would be, closer to Mars. So a little over 500 days.
I was originally going to put it around a red dwarf, but then I realized that would make it tidal locked.
edited 29th Mar '11 10:02:22 AM by petcarcharodon
Like Native Jovian said, the tropic is a better place to be. Some part of the year you could get nice sunny days and cool nights. The organisms there could have two cycles each year between solstices.
edited 29th Mar '11 7:17:21 PM by Blurring
If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?If the planet is spinning, it wouldn't be have a half-yearly summer. You'd have a quarter or so of the year where the day is quite normal, but two opposite quarters would have a quarter-year day on either pole, with pretty much no light getting to the equator. (equator relative to axis of rotation, which was mentioned to be parallel to the orbital plane.)
What? If you have extreme axial tilt, then you end up with really extreme seasons, because your arctic circle (the point where the sun never rises during the winter and never sets during the summer) is effectively the entire hemisphere. It'd be sort of like a tidally locked planet (with a permanent "day side" and "night side"), except that the sides switch once a year.
The fact that it rotates around its own axis as well (giving it a day/night cycle in addition to the seasonal cycle) doesn't actually affect a whole lot, except at the equator, where you'd have a somewhat-normal day/night cycle at some times of the year.
The details depend on the exact degree of tilt.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I'm working on a science fiction setting. Basically, this planet rotates at about 90 degrees, like Uranus. So there's a hot summer and a cold winter, each about half the year. All life on the planet uses long term suspended animation, frozen during the winter. Is there anything else I should be looking into about this?