Envisioning Exoplanets: Searching for Life in the Galaxy

"This is a coffee table book , though it’s currently on my shelf because my coffee table has a rotating set of books. It’s a beautiful book. Michael Carroll is an internationally reputed space artist, and he’s very knowledgeable. There are maybe 200 beautiful, full-color illustrations in the book. The important prefatory comment is that even though we have 5,300 exoplanets that we know of, we don’t have images of more than 100 of them. Most of them are found by these indirect methods of Doppler radial velocities, and the transit of eclipses. Only a very small fraction has had a picture taken of them and even those are just a few pixels or a dot. These illustrations are all visualization, imagination and projection from the basic data. Here’s the mass, here’s the size, we think it might have this in the atmosphere, what would it look like? He follows that through and says, ‘Here’s what I think it might look like.’ “We have 5,300 exoplanets” It’s nice to see something that, unfortunately, scientists can’t. We’re not going to be able to see images of exoplanets—maybe ever. It’s very hard. We’re never going to go there, they’re too far away. We don’t have instruments or telescopes that could ever see them in any kind of detail. For now, space artists are the people who are going to have to represent these worlds and imagine what they look like. I’ve met Michael Carroll a couple of times at a meeting called Spacefest. It’s a wonderful aggregation of astronauts and space artists and engineers who worked at NASA and astronomers and people like me. It’s every year and it moves around the western US. Yes, they’re convincing because he knows the science. In very general terms, we can say that if a planet has a certain mass, it’s likely to have plate tectonics, so there will be volcanoes . If it has a certain mass, it’s going to have either a thick or a thin atmosphere. We can even speculate what the atmosphere might contain and therefore imagine what the sunlight diffusing through it will look like. Also, they orbit different stars. Some of them orbit red dwarfs, so there will be a dull red light that suffuses through the atmosphere. He does as much of the scientific guesswork as he can and then, of course, the details are completely imagined—because we don’t know any."