How Do Artists Portray Exoplanets They've Never Seen?
How realistic are images of planets around other stars—and should they be? CLICK HERE FOR AN IMAGE GALLERY
How Do Artists Portray Exoplanets They've Never Seen?
- Paisley Planet This artist's rendering accompanied the discovery of the first Saturn-size exoplanets around the stars 79 Ceti and HD 46375, each more than 100 light-years from Earth. The rings and moons are speculative, but it's the paisley-pajama feel of the image that bugs Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, the astronomer whose team discovered the planets. "This makes me cringe," he says. Greg Bacon (STScI), NASA
- Oops: Not a Planet This image accompanied a 1999 NASA press release announcing the possible first view of a star outside the solar system. A Hubble shot of a star-forming region in the galaxy IRAS 04361+2547 showed an odd line extending from a star and ending in a dot, which researchers interpreted as potentially the wake of a young Jupiter-like planet kicked out of its orbit. Alas, subsequent research revealed the dot was more likely a star in the background, obscured by dust. Courtesy of Robert Hurt
- …or Maybe Fiery? In an alternate conception of an imagined moon of the planet HD 168443 c, so-called tidal forces caused by the planet's gravity have squeezed and stretched the moon during its many orbits, creating volcanic heat that has melted much of its surface ice. In this view, the moon's planet is ringless and a second satellite [upper left] is similar in color to Io, Jupiter's volcanic moon. (Parent star not shown.) http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/
- Icy Moon… In one possible view of the planetary system around the star HD 168443, more than 100 light-years away in the constellation Serpens, a hypothetical moon (landscape) orbiting a ringed planet is covered in ice, because the star is probably too distant to melt frozen water on the satellite's surface. An inner object—a planet or a dim, failed star called a brown dwarf—hugs the parent star in a tight orbit [upper left]. http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/
- This Is Not a Photo Artist Lynette Cook received many compliments for this 1999 rendering of a planet transiting in front of the star HD 209458, but not always for the right reasons: One person asked her what image processing software she had used to enhance what he thought was a Hubble photo. It's actually a painting. http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/
- Feeling Blue The large gaseous planet or "hot Jupiter" depicted in this image orbiting the star Gliese 436 is colored blue to indicate that the heat from the star may have splintered large, brownish organic molecules in the planet's atmosphere into smaller molecules that scatter blue light instead, says astronomer Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy of Geoff Marcy
- In the Clouds Cloud patterns on so-called hot Jupiters—gas giants orbiting close to their stars—may look something like this image, derived from atmospheric simulations. Such clouds would likely look very different from those of our solar system's gas giants, which spin faster and are far cooler than hot Jupiters, says astronomer Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Courtesy of Greg Laughlin
- Rendering an Exoplanet Artist Tim Pyle of the Spitzer Space Telescope created an image of a hypothetically black, scorching hot exoplanet in stages. Beginning with a computer model of a sphere [upper left], he combined cloud patterns and shading [lower left] with a mottled color scheme of red and black [upper right] and incorporated an image of background stars to complete the vision [lower right]. Courtesy of Tim Pyle
- How a Spectrometer Sees an Exoplanet To discover exoplanets, researchers often use an instrument called a spectrometer to break starlight into its component wavelengths, which are projected onto the pixels of a sensitive CCD (charge-coupled device) camera. In this colorized image, derived from data obtained with the National Solar Observatory's Fourier transform spectrometer at the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope Facility on Kitt Peak, Ariz., black lines represent wavelengths absorbed by atoms in the star. Periodic twitches of the lines as small as one ten-thousandth of a pixel may indicate wobbling caused by an orbiting planet. N. A. Sharp, NOAO/NSO/Kitt Peak FTS/AURA/NSF
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