Huge trees in an "air belt" in space

Question

I read this decades ago.

The idea that there was in space, around some star, an "air" belt, like an asteroid belt, with enough atmosphere that people could live there without special life-support. Maybe there were also rocks and "dirty ice" blocks, but I am not sure. What definitely was there are huge trees, and people mostly have settled on these trees.

Since everything was rotating, Coriolis forces dominated the dynamics, so people who kept "flying" from one tree to another had developed new reflexes very unusual to us.

I do not remember much about the story itself.

I vaguely remember a very dangerous trip to a stable Lagrange point (due to the presence of a planet, probably just a planetoid, sharing the orbit of the air and the trees), but I don't remember why the trip was attempted. Possibly to recover some stuff, since in the story vagrant stuff would tend to drift towards stable Lagrange points (I believe the author did not have a very clear understanding of stable Lagrange points but this is irrelevant).

It was either a rather short novel, perhaps a rather long novella, I am not sure.

Answer 1

This is Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), or possibly its sequel The Smoke Ring (1987). The stories are set in orbit around a neutron star that has a zone of atmosphere in orbit around it at the habitable temperature of liquid water. (There is another, yellow, star that is the binary companion of the neutron star that provides light for photosynthesis, but the smoke ring orbits close to the neutron star.)

People live on the titular kilometres-long trees, which are named after the shape of an integral sign (∫) although as described in the story they are more angular, like 2 hockey sticks taped butt-ends-together. The trees are tidally oriented perpendicular to their orbital motion, and the winds generated by the differing orbital speeds between the top and bottom drag the foliage into "tufts" at each end of the tree. (Except for the tufts, where it is possible to pull moisture out of the moving air, the trees are mostly barren.)

The "satellite" you're talking about is actually Goldblatt's World, a gas giant that is the source of the atmosphere in the smoke ring. Reviewing the plot I believe you're actually recalling the second book (The Smoke Ring) which has Kendy send the people on Citizen's Tree to visit "The Admiralty" who have colonized "The Clump", a semi-stable grouping of ponds and vegetation that orbits at Goldblatt's World's L4 point.