Mars? Pfft. Who wants to live on that boring red kip?
Come the time when extraterrestrial colonisation becomes unavoidable, why not relocate to Earth’s ‘sister planet’?
A 96% carbon dioxide atmosphere.
Mean daytime temperatures of 737 K (464 °C).
Skies filled with clouds of sulphuric acid.
What’s not to like?
German educational design studio Kurzgesagt breaks it down for your delectation.
Previously: The Day The Dinosaurs Died
Behold: the glorious Orion nebula and what it might be like to fly through it. To wit:
The exciting dynamic visualisation of the Orion Nebula is based on real astronomical data and adept movie rendering techniques. Up close and personal with a famous stellar nursery normally seen from 1,500 light-years away, the digitally modelled representation based is based on infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The perspective moves along a valley over a light-year wide, in the wall of the region’s giant molecular cloud. Orion’s valley ends in a cavity carved by the energetic winds and radiation of the massive central stars of the Trapezium star cluster. The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.
(Video: NASA, Spitzer Space Telescope, Universe of Learning; Visualisation: F. Summers (STScI) et al.; Music & License: Serenade for Strings (A. Dvořák), Advent Chamber Orch.)
Behold: what looks like the famous Horsehead nebula of Orion, but isn’t. To wit:
[This} is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the visible light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars to the right of the image centre.
(Image: Adam Block, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona)
Pareidolia – it’s a wonderful thing, especially on this scale. To wit:
Famous Martian rock mesas known by names like the Face on Mars appear quite natural when seen more clearly on better images. Is reality boring? Nobody knows why some clouds make rain. Nobody knows if life ever developed on Mars. Nobody knows why the laundry on the bedroom chair smells like root beer. Scientific exploration can not only resolve mysteries, but uncover new knowledge, greater mysteries, and yet deeper questions. As humanity explores our universe, perhaps fun — through discovery — is just beginning.
The one on the bottom right there?
That’s your ma, that is.
(Image: NASA, Viking 1 Orbiter)
On sol 46 (April 6, 2021) the Perseverance rover held out a robotic arm to take its first selfie on Mars. To wit:
The WATSON camera at the end of the arm was designed to take close-ups of martian rocks and surface details though, and not a quick snap shot of friends and smiling faces. In the end, teamwork and weeks of planning on Mars time was required to program a complex series of exposures and camera motions to include Perseverance and its surroundings. The resulting 62 frames were composed into a detailed mosiac, one of the most complicated Mars rover selfies ever taken. In this version of the selfie, the rover’s Mastcam-Z and SuperCam instruments are looking toward WATSON and the end of the rover’s outstretched arm. About 4 metres from Perseverance is a robotic companion, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter.
(Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS)
Behold: the Orion nebula, tidied up for your viewing pleasure by energetic stars. To wit:
Also known as M42, the nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the nearest large star-forming region, but also because the nebula’s energetic stars have blown away obscuring gas and dust clouds that would otherwise block our view – providing an intimate look at a range of ongoing stages of starbirth and evolution. The featured image of the Orion Nebula is among the sharpest ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.
(Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble Legacy Archive; Processing: Francisco Javier Pobes Serrano)
Behold: a paper moon, a canvas Sun and cardboard clouds. Not really. To wit:
The featured picture of an orange coloured sky is real — a digital composite of two exposures of the solar eclipse that occurred earlier this month. The first exposure was taken with a regular telescope that captured an overexposed Sun and an underexposed Moon, while the second image was taken with a solar telescope that captured details of the chromosphere of the background Sun. The Sun’s canvas-like texture was brought up by imaging in a very specific shade of red emitted by hydrogen. Several prominences can be seen around the Sun’s edge. The image was captured just before sunset from Xilingol, Inner Mongolia, China. It’s also not make-believe to imagine that the Moon is made of dense rock, the Sun is made of hot gas, and clouds are made of floating droplets of water and ice.
(Image: Wang Letian (Eyes at Night)
Yes, gas giants have auroras too. But what drives them? To wit:
To help find out, scientists have sorted through hundreds of infrared images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft for other purposes, trying to find enough aurora images to correlate changes and make movies. Once made, some movies clearly show that Saturnian auroras can change not only with the angle of the Sun, but also as the planet rotates. Furthermore, some auroral changes appear related to waves in Saturn’s magnetosphere likely caused by Saturn’s moons. Pictured here, a false-colored image taken in 2007 shows Saturn in three bands of infrared light. The rings reflect relatively blue sunlight, while the planet itself glows in comparatively low energy red. A band of southern aurora in visible in green. In has recently been found that auroras heat Saturn’s upper atmosphere. Understanding Saturn’s auroras is a path toward a better understanding of Earth’s auroras.
(Image: NASA, Cassini, VIMS Team, U. Arizona, U. Leicester, JPL, ASI)
Behold: the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 4254, aka, Messier 99. To wit:
This recently processed full galaxy portrait stretches over 70,000 light-years across M99. The sharp view is a combination of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared image data from the Hubble Space Telescope. About 50 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Bernices, the face-on spiral is a member of the nearby Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Also cataloged as NGC 4254, a close encounter with another Virgo cluster member has likely influenced the shape of its well-defined, blue spiral arms.
(Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble, Janice Lee; Processing & Copyright: Leo Shatz)
Behold: a recent image of the young star system HD 163296 from which jets of hydrogen are emerging, though no one really knows why. To wit:
The central star in the featured image is still forming but seen already surrounded by a rotating disk and an outward moving jet. The disk is shown in radio waves taken by the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile, and show gaps likely created by the gravity of very-young planets. The jet, shown in visible light taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT, also in Chile), expels fast-moving gas — mostly hydrogen — from the disk centre. The system spans hundreds of times the Earth-Sun distance (au). Details of these new observations are being interpreted to bolster conjectures that the jets are generated and shaped, at least in part, by magnetic fields in the rotating disk. Future observations of HD 163296 and other similar star-forming systems may help fill in details.
(Image: Visible: VLT/MUSE (ESO); Radio: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
