Extrasolar planets
So extrasolar planets are a big thing now. Funny thing was, not only was there a time they were not, but it was taboo to even look for them. Taboo? In science? Lets set the wayback machine to the late 80's and early 90's. Hubble space telescope is completed and launched (and would later need fixed). Giant telescopes like the monstrous Keck twin 10 meter telescopes and Gemini North and South 8.1 meter telescopes and later the 8m ESA telescopes were being planned out. Lot of people were excited about what these new instruments could do and no one more than the few scientists brave enough to work on finding planets outside our solar system. However the larger scientific community had pretty much relegated that to the impossible and anyone who worked on this was ridiculed and was "throwing away their career". Many of these men and women were shunned and even politicians got their oar in by going after their funding. This is pretty much what happens to anyone who dares to dream the "impossible".
Then in 1995 it all changed. The man who was seen as spearheading the effort to find planets didn't even find the first one. Another team did. What did he do? He helped them confirm it. He was happy for this and he didn't mind being second because a ground breaking, world view changing discovery had been made. He was there for the science, not for politics and grandstanding. Now he is one of the most welcome men at any scientific conference. What a change one discovery makes.
Now back to today. The era from 1995-2010 was all about simply being able to point to the sky and say well there's a planet here, here and also over here. But what of the surface conditions? That is what the period from 2010-2020 and onward will be all about. Yesterday scientists just announced something pretty stunning. They confirmed clouds on another world and not only that... they know what color it is. That sounds almost silly, but keep in mind these planets have only been inferred as to their location in space. Little of their light has been collected and that is hard to separate from the light of its parent star.
This time however, they used a rather neat trick. They watched the planet vanish behind the star and just kept tabs on what colors were prevalent. They did this again and again using a planet with just a 2 day orbit so they could repeat it in a short amount of time. Add up the data and then check it by time. By seeing what color intensities change when the planet appears and dissapears you have its color. This planet is around star HD 189733 and designated HD 189733b. It is a roughly jupiter mass planet and we even had a heat map taken by Spitzer, a 21st century infrared scope a few years ago. The planet is locked to the star like the moon is to earth, only showing one face to it. They found on this heat map, the first of any kind of map made of an extrasolar planet that the hot spot isn't dead center but shifted several degrees to the east. What is causing this? Wind. 7000 km/hr winds. They are pushing the hot air east and the hot spot shifts as a result. The back side of the planet is hot enough to glow for a time as well.
But what would it LOOK like? Would it be brown and tan like Jupiter and Saturn or something more exotic? As it turns out, it is blue. A deep cobalt blue, not quite like earth's blue or neptunes blue but yet another shade. What makes it blue? Silicates. Its atmosphere is full of silicates that are heated to glowing on the day side. On the night side they rain out as liquid glass that refracts mostly in the high blue wavelengths. Each one acts like a blue pixel in a giant screen. Far away its just a solid beautiful blue with clouds of silicate vapor thrown in across it. Up close, it is raining quadrillions of liquid glass beads, shimmering in the fading sunlight at the twilight zone between day and night side. What an amazing thing.
So how is this done? Using none other than Hubble, built in the 1980's and launched and repaired in the 1990's. A telescope launched in an age when even inferring a planets existence was considered completely impossible has now seen clouds and the color of a planet we shouldn't know about using a 2. meter mirror that can only resolve Pluto as a fuzzy yellow grey blob. This is the kind of impossible that people witnessed in 1969 with the Apollo landing. While it doesn't have the same glamor around it, this is no less of a leap forward. I can't wait until the 8 meter James Webb telescope goes up in the couple years. I can only imagine what amazing discoveries it will make. Oh and if you are worried about ageing Hubble, we have two more that the NSA/CIA were going to use to spy on people.. Drones made them obsolete for the value per dollar so they gifted them to NASA. Current plans are considering putting one of them in orbit around Mars and using it as both a space telescope and its surveillance mode to zoom in to objects at sub meter resolution on the ground.
Edit: James Webb is a 6 meter, not an 8 meter scope. But still will push the limits of what we can do in this field even further.
Then in 1995 it all changed. The man who was seen as spearheading the effort to find planets didn't even find the first one. Another team did. What did he do? He helped them confirm it. He was happy for this and he didn't mind being second because a ground breaking, world view changing discovery had been made. He was there for the science, not for politics and grandstanding. Now he is one of the most welcome men at any scientific conference. What a change one discovery makes.
Now back to today. The era from 1995-2010 was all about simply being able to point to the sky and say well there's a planet here, here and also over here. But what of the surface conditions? That is what the period from 2010-2020 and onward will be all about. Yesterday scientists just announced something pretty stunning. They confirmed clouds on another world and not only that... they know what color it is. That sounds almost silly, but keep in mind these planets have only been inferred as to their location in space. Little of their light has been collected and that is hard to separate from the light of its parent star.
This time however, they used a rather neat trick. They watched the planet vanish behind the star and just kept tabs on what colors were prevalent. They did this again and again using a planet with just a 2 day orbit so they could repeat it in a short amount of time. Add up the data and then check it by time. By seeing what color intensities change when the planet appears and dissapears you have its color. This planet is around star HD 189733 and designated HD 189733b. It is a roughly jupiter mass planet and we even had a heat map taken by Spitzer, a 21st century infrared scope a few years ago. The planet is locked to the star like the moon is to earth, only showing one face to it. They found on this heat map, the first of any kind of map made of an extrasolar planet that the hot spot isn't dead center but shifted several degrees to the east. What is causing this? Wind. 7000 km/hr winds. They are pushing the hot air east and the hot spot shifts as a result. The back side of the planet is hot enough to glow for a time as well.
But what would it LOOK like? Would it be brown and tan like Jupiter and Saturn or something more exotic? As it turns out, it is blue. A deep cobalt blue, not quite like earth's blue or neptunes blue but yet another shade. What makes it blue? Silicates. Its atmosphere is full of silicates that are heated to glowing on the day side. On the night side they rain out as liquid glass that refracts mostly in the high blue wavelengths. Each one acts like a blue pixel in a giant screen. Far away its just a solid beautiful blue with clouds of silicate vapor thrown in across it. Up close, it is raining quadrillions of liquid glass beads, shimmering in the fading sunlight at the twilight zone between day and night side. What an amazing thing.
So how is this done? Using none other than Hubble, built in the 1980's and launched and repaired in the 1990's. A telescope launched in an age when even inferring a planets existence was considered completely impossible has now seen clouds and the color of a planet we shouldn't know about using a 2. meter mirror that can only resolve Pluto as a fuzzy yellow grey blob. This is the kind of impossible that people witnessed in 1969 with the Apollo landing. While it doesn't have the same glamor around it, this is no less of a leap forward. I can't wait until the 8 meter James Webb telescope goes up in the couple years. I can only imagine what amazing discoveries it will make. Oh and if you are worried about ageing Hubble, we have two more that the NSA/CIA were going to use to spy on people.. Drones made them obsolete for the value per dollar so they gifted them to NASA. Current plans are considering putting one of them in orbit around Mars and using it as both a space telescope and its surveillance mode to zoom in to objects at sub meter resolution on the ground.
Edit: James Webb is a 6 meter, not an 8 meter scope. But still will push the limits of what we can do in this field even further.