Space art: PlanetQuest Exoplanet Travel Posters

NASA’s PlanetQuest website, which provides info on the search for earth-like exoplanets, now offers beautiful posters in the Exoplanet Travel Series.  The set currently includes posters for three distant planets of particular interest:

Kepler-186f_39x27[1]

 

Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially ‘habitable zone’ around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star’s red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that’s very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA’s planet hunting telescope.

HD_40307g_20x30[1]

 

Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between “Super-Earth” and “mini-Neptune” and scientists aren’t sure if it has a rocky surface or one that’s buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight time the Earth’s mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger.

Kepler-16b_20x-30[1]

 

Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren’t good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie’s iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction.

2 thoughts on “Space art: PlanetQuest Exoplanet Travel Posters”

  1. The posters are neat, but isn’t there a problem with -186f? If the star’s a red dwarf, I don’t think the vegetation is going to be red, since that would mean it was reflecting rather than using the most abundant wavelengths.

    BTW the depictions illustrating various star colors are usually far more exaggerated than they would look up close to the human eye. Your red dwarf would likely not look much different than Sol in terms of color.

    What would be ‘more different’ is that there’d be a lot more vigorous activity in terms of sunspots, streamers, etc., than with the Sun – that’s just the way these small stars are inherently. The resulting radiation bursts are one of the big hazards of being on a world close enough to be in the habitable zone.

    1. Checking at Wikipedia, it appears that a Red Dwarf looks more orange-y than the sun but certainly not red. It also mentions the variability of their output due to the sunspots being as much as 40%. Maybe that’s what causes the unpredictable winter/summer cycle in the Game of Thrones!

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