Exoplanet Travel Posters

I've written previously about retro travel posters for otherwhere - different places in spacetime, different planets within our solar system, and previous geological eras. NASA has recently released a delightful collection of retro travel posters for the growing collection of exoplanets. With ongoing planetary science research into planets outside our own solar system (beyond Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Nepture and the larger planetessimals like the ever-popular Pluto and lesser-known Sedna and so forth), there is now a immense database of planets orbitting other stars. Further, astronomers and planetary scientists are able to deduce not only the existence of these planets (by, for instance, the way their home stars' light dims when planets pass between us and the stars), but often their scale, mass and other physical properties. These retro-style travel posters are a fabulous art/science collaboration, means of communicating science and plain old beautiful graphic design. They are also inspiring of humanity's dreams of space exploration. I approve wholeheartedly.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The planet Kepler-16b orbits a binary star. It may be a rocky terrestrial planet, like our Earth, or a gassy giant like Jupiter, though they've selected to show a more familiar terrestrial planet but point out that one of unfamiliar (and perhaps unexpected) consequences of having two suns.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Planet HD 40307g has twice the volume and eight times the mass of Earth! It may be rocky or an icy gas giant ...but it most certainly has one heck of a gravitational pull.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Kepler-186f is an exciting find; it was the first Earth sized planet detected believed to be in the habitable zone around a star, where temperature conditions could allow liquid water. Unlike our sun, Kepler-186f orbits a much colder, redder star. So, if it were to have plant life using photosynthesis, they infer that, "ts 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".

You can find and download the exoplanet posters here.

In other news, in 2015, I hope to bring you more magpie&whiskeyjack posts. I haven't disappeared, or retired, but 2014 posts were few and far between, because baby, as they say. I'm working on balancing my various artistic, scientific and other endeavours with being a new parent. I'll get there, and eventually manage to share all that I would like to!

Communicating the Cosmos, and the Role of Science

Neil deGrasse Tyson 'saints of science' illustration by Steven Hughes

I enjoyed this interview by Stephen Colbert (himself, not his character) of Neil deGrasse Tyson. I watched - or rather, listened to, the whole thing. It wasn't that it revealed a great deal of new science (though they do touch on some recent discoveries), it was simply a wide ranging, interesting conversation by gifted communicators. 



swissmiss

I particularly enjoyed hearing how he came to astrophysics, through the shock of actually seeing the stars when he finally made a trip out of the Bronx. Also, his feelings about movies and interactions with James Cameron are both hilarious and make perfect sense. I know that I can handle self-consistent science fiction even when it plays fast and loose with science, but am irked by allegedly accurate SF which isn't. For instance, I was perfectly happy with the highly speculative premise behind Cameron's Avatar of mapping one's mind onto an alien body but irked (*spoiler alert, in case you somehow have not seen the movie*) that the plot centered around the inability to mine something without spoiling the surface environment, which is such a simple problem to solve. We have directional drilling now, here on Earth, which allows resource extraction kilometers away laterally, as well as deep. For a science nerd like Cameron, this seemed just sloppy to me. I'm not trying to imply that mining has no environmental impact (which would be absurd); I'm saying that the specific problem he used is something we already have the technology to avoid. It wouldn't have been hard to come up with a more convincing-to-earth-scientists problem. I'm sure people who don't know anything about drilling into planets would be mystified by this annoyance of mine (though I'm pretty sure the chemists find the imaginary target of the mining, 'unobtanium' hilarious at best and infuriating at worst). In the end, though, science in entertainment isn't a pressing issue, tempting as it may be to employ the power of blockbuster movies made by science enthusiasts to spread knowledge. Far more important, of course, is the cogent argument for a scientifically literate populace, who can question things for themselves, and who comprehend what science is and what it is not.

Science Nation Army

Today, instead of 'art about science' I bring you 'science about art', if you will.
"Using real footage and sounds from a working science lab, the Inside Knowledge team have reconstructed the White Stripes song Seven Nation Army from scratch."



The equipment is from Imperial College's BLAST lab; like its name suggest, the scientists at the lab study the effects of explosions, specifically "the behaviour of the human skeleton under high impulse loading" from an inter-disciplinary perspective involving medicine, physics, bioengineering, and military research. You can imagine how the machinery might inspire a percussionist. The Inside Knowledge team consists of four science communication students who are interested in the scientific process, not just the sort of headline-grabbing results released at press conferences. They say they want to produce a unique multimedia diary of their time 'embedded' at the BLAST lab. I'm really impressed; this may not be what we think of as 'science communication' but the video did effectively give me a glimpse of what they actually do in the lab, piqued my interest and entertained me - all of which is far to rare in much of the scientific journalism out there.

(via Toronto Standard)