“I don’t know what we are going to find there,” he said. He also talked about NASA’s plans for a mission to Europa, another moon of Jupiter with an icy ocean. “We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place.” “We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too,” Green said. (A body considered to be in a habitable zone is not too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.) The findings suggest that previous ideas about where to find “habitable zones” may have been too limited. Green also described another recent study that used measurements of aurora on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede to prove it has a large liquid ocean beneath its icy crust. I highly recommend you do.īuy Under Alien Skies from . Science News is a affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.She added that getting human field geologists and astrobiologists on Mars would greatly improve the chances of finding fossils of past life on our nearest planetary neighbor. Exactly what, I won’t reveal I’ll let you read the book and find out. If you could zoom in all the way to the center of the black hole, you’d see even weirder stuff. “It’s mesmerizing, if a bit disconcerting,” Plait writes. You have a front-row seat to see the star’s light being bent by the black hole’s gravity. If you squint, you can make out the rim around the black hole, where stars jostle, and then one slides along the curve of the horizon until its light flickers into that nothingness. After the long journey and the suspense of experiencing such a beast, you’d feel cheated if you saw seemingly empty space. But from a safe distance, a starship can get a good peek with some telescopes - good enough that it feels like you’re hovering just above the event horizon, the black hole’s point of no return ( SN: 5/31/14, p. Going inside a black hole is out of the question you’d be toast. The book ends with an aptly named final chapter, “The last sky you’ll ever see,” which contemplates the view from close to a black hole. The loose rock and ice would appear as wispy as piles of pixie dust. The lander shattered the rocks it hit on impact, even though it was moving slower than a typical walking speed. “It’s so good to see you.” Finding Philae and exploring the aftermath of its crash would show just how fragile the comet is, Plait explains. It’s Philae, the lander that bounced and crashed on the comet in 2014 ( SN: 8/22/15, p. The pole is attached to a box, turned off-kilter. Jetting to the smaller lobe, Plait points out a metal pole jutting from the rocks. “ ‘Smaller’ seems like the wrong word it looks like an entire planet hanging over your head,” Plait writes. Looking up toward the sky means seeing the rocks of the smaller lobe. One of my favorite stops on Plait’s tour is the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, a two-lobed object shaped like a big rubber ducky. But it would blaze as a “painfully bright” dot, Plait writes, about 160 times as bright as the moon looks to us, and it would have a faint, deep-blue halo because Pluto’s thin air scatters short, blue wavelengths of light. Standing on Pluto, the sun would appear one-fiftieth its size from Earth’s viewpoint. It’s so far away from the sun that, even at midday, the sky is utterly black and the stars are visible.Ĭontrary to what some articles on the internet say, the sun would not look like any other star in the sky. It’s typically the color of rust, because the Red Planet’s atmosphere is chock-full of dust that tends to scatter red light the most. Thanks to rovers, we’ve seen actual images of Mars’ sky ( SN: 8/13/22, p. In some cases, it’s not too hard to imagine the views. He even includes explanations of the space suits you’d need to stand and gaze at the skies on the moon, Mars, Pluto and other orbs. Plait is the perfect captain on this expedition, vividly bringing these alien worlds to life while deftly weaving in the science to support the scenery.
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