I
have long been a fan of the artistic rendering of a scientific
phenomenon. I got hooked through dinosaur paintings and black hole
renderings, but really fell in love when I started reporting on
exoplanets. While some dinosaur imaginings are legitimately beautiful,
most planetary renderings are plainly utilitarian. We don't know much
about the exoplanets, so artists shy away from details even as they
provide bloggers with something to stick at the top of their posts
(we're not above that, either!). Take the announcement yesterday of a
planet orbiting two stars like the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. In the
rendering that NASA released, the planet is barely visible, just a
circular smudge of brown and orange. Certainly, these computer-generated
drawings are nowhere near as complex as the images that our probes have
brought back of our solar system's planets.
Nonetheless, there
is an appeal to these images: they leave a lot to the imagination. And
given that we won't have any actual images of planets outside our solar
for the foreseeable future, they are the best we've got. Check out more
exoplanet images below.
No comments:
Post a Comment