What Does Sunset On an Alien World Look Like? 94
The Bad Astronomer writes "Using real data from Hubble Space Telescope of a planet orbiting another star, exoplanetary scientist Frédéric Pont created a lovely image of what sunset would look like from HD209458b, nicknamed Osiris, a planet 150 light years away. The Hubble data gave information on the atmospheric absorption of this hot Jupiter planet, and, coupled with models of how the atmosphere was layered, Pont was able to create a realistic looking sunset on the planet. The big surprise: the star looks green as it sets! Sodium absorption sucks out the red colors and blue is scattered away, leaving just the green hues to get through. It's a lovely application of hard scientific knowledge."
And conveniently enough (Score:1, Insightful)
it's located someplace that we're not going to be able to verify the results.
Re:And conveniently enough (Score:5, Insightful)
it's located someplace that we're not going to be able to verify the results.
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...you don't actually have to go there to know how light will pass through the atmosphere...
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If a Tree Falls in the Forest... (Score:2)
Does George Berkeley Exist to Hear It? [wikimedia.org]
Re:And conveniently enough (Score:5, Interesting)
We are talking about how a star (which we can clearly measure) interacts with an atmosphere (which, again, we can clearly measure). Nothing as small or dark as Pluto needs to be measured to figure out what the "sunset" looks like. Comparing the two is highly specious. Not being able to directly image a dark, tiny rock is a lot different to being able to detect the atmosphere of a planet and the output of a (relatively) very bright star.
I guess it's best to leave this stuff to the professionals ;)
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We can barely measure the star, and we certainly can't measure the atmosphere with any degree of certainty from 150 light years away. At best we can achieve is a few spectroscopic measurements of the absorption of upper atmosphere. This work is based on suspect modeling which in turn is based on a very tiny amount of data and nothing about the surface layers of the atmosphere.
Professionals indeed.
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Exactly. Any light being absorbed/reflected by the lower layers will have passed twice thru the upper layers, once on the way in, again on the way out. We have no way of telling at this distance what is really being filtered where.
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Seriously, learn a little about optics, spectroscopy, and remote sensing. Conceptually, what this guy did isn't even that hard to comprehend, though actually working the problem isn't easy at all. We certainly have ways of telling (within a confidence interval) what is going on. Is it perfect? Of course not, and I'm sure it would look different in reality. But I'd bet good money (sadly, neither you nor I will live to see ground truth) that it's fairly close.
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No one knows what Pluto looks like, but somehow we know what another planet looks like from hundres/thousands of lightyears away? Makes no sense to me.
If you'd bothered to look at the picture before posting you'd know there's no 'planet' in it.
You don't even have to read this one, just look at the picture.
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Maybe you should have RTFA and not just looked a the picture. The picture attached to the article shows a view of the star as seen from the planet, NOT a picture of the planet itself. They even explain that the star looks the way it does because the apparent size of the star means that it displays every color absorption at once instead of changing color gradually as Sol does here on Earth.
I can see why you would assume that was a picture of the planet, but you're wrong.
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This: http://www.insu.cnrs.fr/co/univers/les-exoplanetes/un-disque-cyan-dans-un-ciel-pourpre-coucher-de-soleil-sur-osiris [insu.cnrs.fr] is the official link
This: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/01/09/sunset-on-an-alien-world/ [discovermagazine.com] is an article targeting laymen. It's from Discover *Magazine*. It's science entertainment, not a peer reviewed journal. The 'planet' your so upset about is an artist paid to slap together something for people to look at
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Don't get me wrong, they're probably correct, but then again because of the location we can't verify that the results are correct and that there isn't something else going on that changes the results. One thing about science is that without verification you don't know if an as yet unknown effect or situation is going to make for an unexpected result.
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it's located someplace that we're not going to be able to verify the results.
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...you don't actually have to go there to know how light will pass through the atmosphere...
How do you know the laws of physics work the same way there without being able to verify the results?
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> The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...
And your proof is ... ?
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The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...
And your proof is ... ?
You can't draw any conclusions at all without that assumption. It's nearly as fundamental as assuming that there's an objective observable universe at all...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
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it's located someplace that we're not going to be able to verify the results.
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here...you don't actually have to go there to know how light will pass through the atmosphere...
Not exactly... all I get are Server 500 errors. That's not what I pictured an alien sunset looking like.
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Not exactly... all I get are Server 500 errors. That's not what I pictured an alien sunset looking like.
The slashdot effect works the same way there that it does here. You don't actually have to go there to know that making the slashdot front page will cripple their servers.
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Click the 2nd link.
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Re:And conveniently enough (Score:5, Informative)
The laws of physics work the same way there that they do here
That is a metaphysical assumption of physics, not an observed fact. We won't know that for sure until we go there.
Of course...it is probably true.
Re:And conveniently enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed; they could easily figure out what a sunset would look like on one of Jupiter's moons by sending a probe. But the picture wouldn't look like what was predicted by computer model; I've never seen two sunsets that were exactly alike. Latitude, temperature, air pressure, etc -- there are too many variables. When I was stationed in Thailand in the Air Force I saw what I would have thought were breathtakingly beautiful sunsets at a certain time of year that contained all the colors there were, including green. You don't get sunsets like that this far north.
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We know what the atmosphere on Earth is like VERY well, and yet we cannot get a single image that shows what a sunset always looks like, because details of the atmosphere change, every day, everywhere. I very much doubt it is that simple on any distant planet.
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For a while. Have a little faith, we'll get there some day. Or at least our distant descendants.
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It's a 150 light years away, we're not talking about a few thousand years worth of developments there. We would need to get very close to the speed of light for it to take a reasonable period of time to get there. And even at half the speed of light you're looking at having to wait 300 years for the probe to get there and an additional 150 years for the first results to come back.
In the meantime you'd have a probe operating independently and being bombarded by cosmic rays. Hopefully nothing went wrong as we
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We would need to get very close to the speed of light for it to take a reasonable period of time to get there.
Depends on how much in a hurry you are. With a Project Orion type spacecraft you could get there in a few thousand years. And while that sounds like a long while, humanity has already build things that latest that long, i.e. the pyramids.
Re:TARDIS (Score:2)
Since this planet has a green sun, the photosynthetic life there can't be green, or it would reflect away all the light. They said the blue is all scattered away, meaning the plants would likely be red.
Obviously this planet is Gallifrey complete with red fields and Timelords, and TARDISes etc.
With TARDISes, 150 light years is no obsticle at all.
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It should be simple enough to test his method. Use it to make illustrations for Earth, the Moon, and Mars. That should give us some indication as to its accuracy.
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And apparently... (Score:5, Funny)
...they get overloaded servers there too. :P
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Someone with points Mod Parent up Funny!
Re:And apparently... (Score:5, Informative)
Same here, http response 500.
Coral cache: http://www.exoclimes.com.nyud.net/paper-outlines/the-sunset-on-hd-209458-b/ [nyud.net]
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And here's a Google cache, for those of us who are behind firewalls which block "Hacking/Proxy Avoidance Systems":
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.exoclimes.com/paper-outlines/the-sunset-on-hd-209458-b/+ [googleusercontent.com]
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Actually, the link is working perfectly. The civilization that lives on HD209458b eventually surrounded their entire planet in orbiting solar panels for maximum clean power generation. The inside of the panels is an LCD screen that plays back a prerecorded video giving the illusion of a sun, moon and stars. However, despite all their technological advancement, the system isn't quite perfect yet, and every day at the exact moment the sun sets, the whole system crashes and kicks up an Internal Server Error
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It's also a somewhat bloated software stack, too:
Apache mod_qos/9.69 mod_fcgid/2.3.6 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at www.exoclimes.com Port 80
No lean mean page serving machine here (it can take something like that to make it through a slashdotting [wikipedia.org].
I always hoped (Score:1)
It would look something like this [abcnews.com]
Only if... (Score:2)
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The question wasn't "what do aliens see on a sunset on their world?", but "what would we see on a sunset on an alien world?"
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Nope, here is the title: "What Does Sunset On an Alien World Look Like?"
Where did you read anything about "what would we see on a sunset on an alien world?"
I realize that as a geek (whatever that means) i tend to read the question to the letter, as any normal computer would do, hence my confusion.....
Hence your not getting laid. *roll eyes*
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"What Does Sunset On an Alien World Look Like?"
Note that it does not specifically say who is doing the seeing. As life on other planets remains entirely theoretical (while human exploration of space is historically proven possible), the logical assumption is that a human, or a human-designed camera, is doing the viewing, and thus would invalidate the need to factor for alien biologies.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Um, no ... since you clearly didn't read TFA, here you go:
So, the article is showing what this would look like to human eyes.
This in no way attempts to talk about w
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it's a hot jupiter planet, doubt there's any life there.
you'd think the guy would have started with what does sunset on jupiter look like tho
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only if they actually SEE with the same organs as we do.
If they see with the same organs I do, I'm asking for my eyes back.
Looks very familar (Score:5, Funny)
It looks to me like the sunset has a striking resemblance to a 500 error.
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That's only because you don't have alien eyes to appreciate its beauty.
Sunset on another world. (Score:1)
Does that mean we have to be on that other world to view it?
use coral cache (Score:1)
I just added .nyud.net [nyud.net] to the end of the domain name and I could read the article and see the pics.
Internal Server Error (Score:3)
It looks like an Internal Server Error? I would have thought it would be more interesting than that. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
This is news? (Score:1)
How?
And Mars has blue sunsets... (Score:1)
No need to travel light years far for an exotic sunset. Mars has blue sunsets:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ops/ss24_0.jpg
I suppose it's just whatever your atmosphere decides to refract. Ours is red-orange-yellow. Mars has blue. This one has green. And I suppose there are even purple sunsets somewhere.
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Part of the color comes from what you have on the atmosphere, as different molecules absorb at different wavelengths and, as a consequence, only let go everything else. It is also due to the light the star itself emits.
But the most important part is how thick the atmosphere is. There is a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering [wikipedia.org] that correlates how much the light is scattered the wavelength. It basically says that the thicker the atmosphere, the more light is scattered and the more you see the reds, as opposed
/.ed (Score:1)
Slashdotted a planet 150 lights years away. The power of
Sunset a non-event? (Score:2)
Seeing as this alien world would be at least a handful of light years away, I imagine that the setting of our sun looks like any other distant star setting across the horizon. ;-)
Image? (Score:3)
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I don't know. (Score:3)
I've always been too in busy in the back seat of a car with some alien babe parked at the viewpoint when they happen.
- Captain Kirk
Hmmmm, (Score:2)
Hmmmm, the sun is the star that the earth revolves around. Our sun would just appear as a star in their sky. I would therefore imagine that the sunset on a distant planet would look much like the setting of any star in our sky, not too spectacular.
Gravity sucks (Score:1)
Short Version: (Score:2)
Bluish Green.