Other worlds: Deep space through the eyes of an artist. Planets of multi-colored suns Paintings of artists about other planets

Jupiter's crescent slowly hovers over the horizon of its moon Europa. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly perturbed due to orbital resonance with Io, which is now just passing in the background of Jupiter. The tidal warp causes Europa's surface to become deeply cracked and provide heat to the moon, stimulating underground geological processes that keep the subsurface ocean liquid.

Sunrise on Mars

Sunrise at the bottom of one of the canyons of the Labyrinth of Night in the province of Tharsis on Mars. The reddish color of the sky is given by dust scattered in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of “rust” - iron oxides (if you apply automatic color correction in a photo editor to real photographs taken by rovers, the sky on them will become a “normal” blue color. Surface stones, however, at the same time, they will acquire a greenish tint, which is not true, so it’s correct after all, as it is here). This dust scatters and partially refracts light, as a result, a blue halo appears around the Sun in the sky.

Dawn on Io

Sunrise on Io, moon of Jupiter. The snow-like surface in the foreground is composed of sulfur dioxide crystals ejected to the surface by geysers like the one now visible below the near horizon. There is no atmosphere that creates turbulence, so the geyser has such a regular shape.

Dawn on Mars

Solar eclipse on Callisto

The sun will soon emerge from behind the right edge of Jupiter; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of a giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish band behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner solar system, known to terrestrial observers as the "zodiacal light"

Sunrise on Mercury

The disk of the sun from Mercury looks three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

Given the slow rotation of this planet, before that, for several weeks from the same point, it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon.

Triton

Full Neptune in the sky is the only source of light for the night side of Triton. The thin line across Neptune's disk is its rings edge-on, and the dark circle is the shadow of Triton itself. The opposite edge of the depression in the middle plan is about 15 kilometers away.

Sunrise on Triton

"Summer" on Pluto

Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto has an atmosphere at times. This happens when Pluto, moving in its elongated orbit, comes closer to the Sun than Neptune. During this approximately twenty-year period, part of the methane-nitrogen ice on its surface evaporates, enveloping the planet in an atmosphere that rivals that of Mars in density. On February 11, 1999, Pluto once again crossed the orbit of Neptune and again became further from it from the Sun (and would now be the ninth planet, the farthest from the Sun, if in 2006, with the adoption of the definition of the term "planet", it had not been "demoted") .

Now until 2231, it will be an ordinary (albeit the largest) frozen Kuiper belt planetoid - dark, covered in an armor of frozen gases, in places acquiring a reddish tint from interaction with gamma rays from outer space.

Dangerous Dawn on Gliese 876d

Danger in itself can carry dawns on the planet Gliese 876d. Although, in fact, none of humanity knows the real conditions on this planet. It orbits at a very close distance from the variable star, the red dwarf Gliese 876. This image shows how the artist imagined them. The mass of this planet is several times greater than the mass of the Earth, and the size of its orbit is smaller than the orbit of Mercury. Gliese 876d rotates so slowly that the conditions on this planet are very different day and night.

It can be assumed that on Gliese 876d strong volcanic activity is possible, caused by gravitational tides, which deforms and heats the planet, and itself intensifies during the daytime.

Ship

Ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet

Gliese 581

Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from earth

As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to it on one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the luminary can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the size of the Sun in diameter and a hundred times dimmer.

planetars

Planetars or wandering planets are called planets that do not revolve around stars, but drift freely in interstellar space.

Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were ejected into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the galaxy, but they are nearly impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the planetary mass is 0.6-0.8 of the Earth's and higher, then it is able to retain an atmosphere around it that will trap the heat generated by its interior, and the temperature and pressure on the surface may even be acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface.

The globular cluster on the edge of which this planetary travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps, in its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole hiding. Globular clusters usually contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.

When a star like our Sun nears the end of its lifespan, it expands to more than 200 times its original diameter, becoming a red giant and destroying the system's inner planets.

For the last hundred million years, it has been bathed in streams of light and heat, melted nitrogen-methane ice formed the atmosphere, and rivers of real water flow on its surface. But soon - by astronomical standards - this planet will again plunge into darkness and cold - now forever.

gloomy landscape

Landscape of an unnamed planet drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust

The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the lack of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface was reduced so much that most of the atmosphere simply froze and fell in the form of snow. The life that once flourished here is gone.

sun in the sky

The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

By the time this global glaciation began, unicellular life already existed on Earth, and if volcanoes had not saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane over millions of years so that the ice began to melt, life on Earth would still be represented by bacteria huddling on rocky outcrops and in areas of volcanism.

Ambler

Alien world with different geology. The formations resemble remnants of layered ice. Judging by the absence of sedimentary material in the lowlands, they were formed by melting rather than weathering.

The birth of a planet in the system of two suns

Landscape of Mars and the polar cap region

Birth of a planet in the system of two Suns (second option)

Planet of the Blue Sun (third option)

Planet of the system of three suns

Planet of the Blue Sun (fifth option)

Planet of the Great Red Sun

Planet of the Emerald Green Sun

Planet of the system of three suns

Sunset Green Sun

Planet with five moons

Planet of the Green Sun. Sunrise

supernova explosion

When the task is to at least briefly talk about the work of an artist, first of all you try to assess the extent to which he managed to convey the reality of the world around him. But here is one picture, the second, the third, the tenth... Looking at the canvases, the viewer seems to be looking through windows that are open to completely different worlds.

Here are the planets of the Blue and Orange Suns, and here is the world of the Green Sun. Look at the next picture - and you will find yourself in the wonderful world of the Blue Sun. And this is a spectacle of a truly universal scope: the explosion of a supernova. Another canvas - and we are witnessing the birth of an unknown planet.

All this is the work of the science fiction artist G. I. Kurnin. He devoted more than twenty years of creativity to the space theme. His paintings were awarded the first prize at the international competition "The World of Tomorrow". Kurnin's exhibitions have been repeatedly arranged in our country and abroad. Reproductions of his paintings can be seen on the pages of popular magazines with millions of copies. Numerous letters are sent to the artist living in Sochi. Soviet and foreign admirers of his work are interested in how the idea of fantastic paintings is born, whether the artist’s canvases are only a figment of the imagination or his pictorial fantasies are based on scientific data, and many other questions.

It is noteworthy that cosmonauts, astronomers, physicists, space technology specialists, and science fiction writers show great interest in Kurnin's work. Young people are also keenly interested in them.

How is the attention to the work of the artist known to people so different in their occupation, age, temperament, and aesthetic needs? It seems that the answers to these questions are contained in the works of Kurnin themselves. His first painting on the space theme "Landscape of the Moon" appeared as a result of a kind of synthesis of a thorough study of scientific data and creative imagination. This picture was painted even before spacecraft visited the Moon and the whole world went around large-scale photographs of our natural satellite. However, even then the artist managed to create a true picture of the world, distant from us by a colossal space. However, astronauts and astronomers are surprised not only and not so much by this. They are attracted by the beauty and grandeur of the lunar landscape created by the artist, the variety of its colors and halftones. Before us is the pass of the lunar circus. Sharp rocks. Sharp transitions from light to shadow, softened by the glow of the matte disk of the Earth. Black velvet sky with dazzlingly bright stars. On the edge of the lunar circus - a group of astronauts.

In this case, the artist (as, by the way, happened more than once in the work of science fiction writers) managed to predict what was later confirmed.

But here is another picture - "Planet of the Blue Sun".

A bay of an extraterrestrial sea, fenced off by huge crystalline cliffs. They resemble gigantic buildings erected by unknown beings. A blue luminary descending below the horizon illuminates everything around with a flickering light. This world is unusual and strange. The sensitive ears of terrestrial radio telescopes have not yet heard his breathing, and spacecraft from the Earth have not reached here either. And does this world really exist? There can be no exact answer to this question, but it is possible that there is. Curnin's fiction has real roots. The artist has read many books and articles on astronomy and the theory of interplanetary flights, space biology, rocket technology, studied materials from numerous discussions on the problems of extraterrestrial civilizations, and collected information about milestone space flights.

Curnin has been painting for a long time - more than forty years. However, the artist considers the last two decades to be the most fruitful, when he devoted himself entirely to the development of the space theme. "Of course, - Kurnin admits, - I would not have been able to take it seriously if by this time I had not formed as an artist."

Georgy Ivanovich Kurnin was born on November 26, 1915 in Tashkent in a working-class family. Kurnin's father, a highly qualified painter, was an educated man at that time. He was passionately fond of painting, devoted all his free time to working on sketches and reading. The future artist learned to read early, and even earlier - to draw. The first books that Kurnin read were fairy tales. "The Little Humpbacked Horse", "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Scarlet Flower" ... Then there were K. Flammarion, Jules Verne, A. Belyaev, G. Wells. Princesses and knights were replaced in the albums of the future artist by drawings of spacecraft and monsters from unknown worlds. So for the first time Curnin joined science fiction. The works of Kurnin the schoolboy were exhibited at regional and republican exhibitions, awarded with diplomas and prizes. They were noticed by the artist S. S. Razvadovsky, who worked a lot with the young man, and after graduating from school recommended him to the Tashkent Art School. Having finished the painting department ahead of schedule, the young man considered himself insufficiently prepared for a big job. He wanted to study more deeply the work of the great masters of the past. Kurnin enters the Faculty of Theory and History of Art of the Central Asian State University (now Tashkent University named after V. I. Lenin). Having received a diploma in art history, he becomes a teacher and continues to paint with enthusiasm. Famous artists P. P. Belkov, A. V. Nikolaev, V. I. Ufimtsev take patronage over Kurnin. First, together with them, and then on his own, Kurnin travels a lot in Central Asia. On trips, a series of his Central Asian landscapes is born.

Then the artist suffered misfortune. A severe injury left him unable to move for a long time. On the urgent recommendation of doctors, Kurnin moves to the Black Sea coast, to Sochi. Then, in the early 1950s, the artist's attention was increasingly drawn to the problems of space flights. In a modest apartment on one of the seaside streets of Sochi, the first sketches of picturesque fantastic compositions are being made, which later critics will call "cosmic symphonies". For those years, the decision to dedicate one's creativity to space was rather daring, since the era of exploration of interplanetary space had not yet begun, we were just standing on its threshold. The fine arts had no traditions in this respect; there were no works on this subject, with the exception of illustrations for some literary works.

In the creative luggage of Kurnin there are many interesting original paintings. He started out as a genre painter. Then he devoted himself to the landscape of Central Asia. The nature of this amazing and vast region conquered him. Conquered primarily with its contrasts. He was struck by the riot of colors of the oases and the majestic monotony of the deserts. He was equally captivated by the stormy rhythms of life in the fertile valleys and the proud silence of the mountains. These contrasts marked the landscapes of Kurnin, on which he worked in Central Asia. He also looked for contrasts later, when he moved to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. The works created here can be called a search for the unusual in the ordinary. Here is the sea bathed in the July sun. Deserted beach with red-hot pebbles. A light haze sways over the shore - barely perceptible, crystal-clear, winding jets of air. The artist tries to make them more visible, tangible, material. In these silvery jets, stretching from the hot earth, we see, as it were, a condensed haze, its condensate. Before us is a hyperbole of a natural phenomenon. As a result - a feeling of not just reality, but super-reality, a special tangibility of what is happening.

To find the unusual in the ordinary - such a task was set by Kurnin, working on some earthly landscapes. Now that he has turned to fantasies on space themes, his creative super-task can be formulated as follows: to see the familiar in the unusual. It seems that these two tasks are closely related, one is a continuation of the other. To look into the world that exists somewhere in the vast distance , into a world that is often only assumed - the pictorial language of Kurnin is subordinated to the solution of this creative problem.

The landscape "Sunset on the planet Venus" appeared at a time when space probes were not launched towards this planet.

What was then known about Venus to the artist? Kurnin reasoned approximately as follows: in the presence of a powerful dense layer of the atmosphere, the sun will highlight in the clouds only the place over which it is located. High temperatures on the surface of the planet, reaching up to 500 ° C, mean that low-melting metals will be in a liquid state, and stone masses will be red-hot and sintered. Obviously there must be volcanoes.

The coloring of the picture is sustained in unusual reddish tones. In the foreground is a lake of molten metal, surrounded by red-hot rocks, the edges of which are also melted. Further - the rocks, behind which you can see the deep gorge. And above all these are low dense clouds, through which a huge setting sun shines through.

When, many years later, astronomers met with the artist, who studied the data of space probes launched to Venus, they confirmed that the world of this planet should look like this.

Of course, not all of Kurnin's picturesque fantasies can be verified by scientific data. And when else will expeditions visit the planets of the Blue or Green Suns, on the planet with three moons? However, do these planets exist?

The artist believes that they exist. And by the power of his images, he wants to captivate and convince the viewer as well. This is how his paintings about other galaxies, about encounters with unknown life forms appear. In the paintings of Kurnin, we sometimes see people who were not lost in the boundless expanses of the Universe, but found what they were looking for...

All this is just a dream today. But yesterday, flights to the Moon, Venus, Mars also seemed like a dream, but today they have become a reality!

ALEXANDER LABZIN.
Ph.D. in History of Arts

Perhaps no one in the past recorded extraordinary celestial phenomena so accurately and with such thoroughness as the ancient astronomers of the East. According to the unanimous statement of the chronicles, in 1054 a very bright guest star, never seen before, shone in the constellation Taurus.

In brilliance, it surpassed Venus and for some time was the third luminary, after the Sun and the Moon. Later it turned out that a guest star - now called a supernova - flared up in the center of the famous Crab Nebula.

This flash - the rarest phenomenon in the Universe - I saw on the canvas of the artist Georgy Ivanovich Kurnin. An instantaneous glow made the bulk of rocks and fiords approaching the sea crystal-clear ("Supernova Explosion").

I do not presume to judge the skill of Kurnin as an art critic or an artist. The theme of his works is close to me as an astronaut. More than once I tried to imagine what manifestations of life could be on other planets, in other galaxies. Kurnin shows us the worlds of the Blue Sun, the Yellow Sun. Ruby-Red Sun... The works are very different both in color and in composition, but they all seem to have merged into a single symphony of space.

I was convinced of the veracity, so to speak, of the artist's imagination by the accurately conveyed interweaving of light and shadow, the soft transition from one tone to another. It is this iridescent gamut of colors that is seen by a person who has been in space. The contrast in comparison with the first canvas, painted in cold blue tones, is "Sunset on the planet of the Great Red Sun". A huge crimson disk froze over the horizon, giving the last warmth to the liana-like plants, as if saying goodbye to it.

I learned, not without surprise, that Georgy Ivanovich first "hears" the picture, vividly representing the color in the music, and only then paints it. So Blok heard poems that had not yet been created, so Scriabin "tried" colors by ear.

Heard and presented to the smallest detail, the artist "splashes" the cosmic plot onto a large canvas. His fantastic symphonies lie on spacious canvases 2x3 meters in size.

And one more feature that distinguishes the work of this science fiction writer. On his canvases you will not see space technology. She remained somewhere outside the picture. And this, in my opinion, is naturally true. A person who has arrived on an unknown planet, which he has dreamed of so much, will at first eagerly look around. Georgy Ivanovich very accurately conveys the mood of these exciting first minutes. When I looked at the canvases in the artist's studio, I thought: only an enthusiastic, knowledgeable, interesting person can write such a thing. Indeed, Georgy Ivanovich, who devoted more than twenty years of his life to space fantasy, turned out to be just such a person. He is extremely demanding of himself.

And I believe that years of hard work and persistent creative search will bring well-deserved recognition to the Sochi science fiction writer.

V. I. SEVASTYANOV
Pilot-Cosmonaut of the USSR, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Candidate of Technical Sciences

On the cover:
Supernova explosion. Fragment
Sunset on the planet Venus. Fragment

PLANETS OF COLORED SUNS
16 postcards

Authors A. S. Labzin and V. I. Sevastyanov
Editor S. N. Levandovsky. Designed by L. B. Kozin.
Technical editor A. M. Timoshenok.
Art editor M. A. Bychkov.
M-48544. 11/25/80. Ed. No. 669179. Circulation 50,000 copies. Order 5560. 2221211. Price 1 rub. 37 k. Publishing house "Artist of the RSFSR". Leningrad, Bolsheokhtinsky pr. 6, building 2.
Order of the Red Banner of Labor type. them. Volodarsky Lenizdat, Leningrad, Fontanka, 57.
Publishing house "Artist of the RSFSR" 1981

	80205-203
	М173(03)-81

09.07.2012 Artist Walter Myers used scientific data to create landscapes as close to reality as possible. Thanks to his paintings, we can admire the landscapes of other planets. We offer you to look at a selection of Myers' paintings and imagine that you are meeting the sunrise on Mars and examining the geysers on Jupiter's moon Io.

1. Sunrise on Mars.

Sunrise at the bottom of one of the canyons of the Labyrinth of Night in the province of Tharsis on Mars. The reddish color of the sky is given by dust scattered in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of "rust" - iron oxides (if you apply automatic color correction in a photo editor to real photographs taken by rovers, the sky on them will become a "normal" blue color. Surface stones, however, at the same time, they will acquire a greenish tint, which is not true, so it’s correct after all, as it is here). This dust scatters and partially refracts light, as a result, a blue halo appears around the Sun in the sky.

2. Dawn on Io.

3. Dawn on Mars

4. Solar eclipse on Callisto.

It is the most distant of the four large moons of Jupiter. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice in half with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the matter of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, tidal interactions practically do not torment this satellite, so the surface ice can reach a hundred kilometers thick, and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image, we are looking at Jupiter from a position of about 5° from the north pole of Callisto. The sun will soon emerge from behind the right edge of Jupiter; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of a giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish band behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the plane of the ecliptic of the inner solar system, known to terrestrial observers as the “zodiacal light”

5. Jupiter - satellite view of Europa.

Jupiter's crescent slowly hovers over Europa's horizon. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly perturbed due to orbital resonance with Io, which is now just passing in the background of Jupiter. The tidal warp causes Europa's surface to become deeply cracked and provide heat to the moon, stimulating underground geological processes that keep the subsurface ocean liquid.

6. Sunrise on Mercury.

The disk of the sun from Mercury looks three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

7. Given the slowness of the rotation of this planet, before that, for several weeks from the same point it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon

8. Triton.

9. Sunrise on Triton looks no less impressive:

10. "Summer" on Pluto.

Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto has an atmosphere at times. This happens when Pluto, moving in its elongated orbit, comes closer to the Sun than Neptune. During this approximately twenty-year period, part of the methane-nitrogen ice on its surface evaporates, enveloping the planet in an atmosphere that rivals that of Mars in density. On February 11, 1999, Pluto once again crossed the orbit of Neptune and again became farther from it from the Sun (and would now be the ninth planet, the farthest from the Sun, if in 2006, with the adoption of the definition of the term "planet", it had not been "demoted") . Now until 2231, it will be an ordinary (albeit the largest) frozen Kuiper belt planetoid - dark, covered in an armor of frozen gases, in places acquiring a reddish tint from interaction with gamma rays from outer space.

11. Dangerous dawn on Gliese 876d.

12. The ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet.

13. Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from Earth.

The main attraction of its system is the first exoplanet discovered by scientists Gliese 581 C within the "habitable zone" - that is, not too close and not too far from the star so that liquid water can be on its surface. The planet's surface temperature ranges from -3 ° C to +40°С, which means that it can be inhabited.Gravity on its surface is one and a half times higher than the earth, and the "year" is only 13 days. As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to it on one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the luminary can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the size of the Sun in diameter and a hundred times dimmer.

14. Planetars or wandering planets are called planets that do not revolve around stars, but drift freely in interstellar space. Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were ejected into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the galaxy, but they are nearly impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the planetary mass is 0.6-0.8 of the Earth's and higher, then it is able to retain an atmosphere around it that will trap the heat generated by its interior, and the temperature and pressure on the surface can be even acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface. The globular cluster on the edge of which this planetary travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps, in its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole hiding. Globular clusters usually contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.

15. When a star like our Sun nears its end of life, it expands to more than 200 times its original diameter, becoming a red giant and destroying the system's inner planets. Then, over several tens of thousands of years, the star episodically ejects its outer layers into space, sometimes forming concentric shells, after which a small, very hot core is left, which cools and contracts to become a white dwarf. Here we see the beginning of compression - the star sheds the first of its gaseous shells. This ghostly sphere will gradually expand, eventually going far beyond the orbit of this planet - "Pluto" of this star system, which spent almost its entire history - ten billion years - far away on its outskirts in the form of a dark dead ball covered with a layer of frozen gases. For the last hundred million years, it has been bathed in streams of light and heat, melted nitrogen-methane ice formed the atmosphere, and rivers of real water flow on its surface. But soon - by astronomical standards - this planet will again plunge into darkness and cold - now forever.

16. A gloomy landscape of an unnamed planet drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar gas and dust cloud.

The light from other stars is hidden, while the solar wind from the central luminary of the system "inflates" the material of the nebula, creating a bubble of relatively free space around the star, which is visible in the sky in the form of a bright spot with a diameter of about 160 million km - this is a tiny hole in The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the lack of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface has decreased so much so that most of the atmosphere simply froze and snowed in. The life that once thrived here is gone.

17. The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

Discovered in 1995, Teide 1 is one of the brown dwarfs - tiny stars with a mass several tens of times smaller than the Sun - and is located four hundred light years from Earth in the Pleiades star cluster. Teide 1 has a mass about 55 times that of Jupiter and is considered quite large for a brown dwarf. and, therefore, hot enough to support the fusion of lithium in its depths, but it is not able to start the process of fusion of hydrogen nuclei, like our Sun. This substar has existed for probably only about 120 million years (compared to the 4500 million years of the Sun's existence), and burns at 2200°C - and not half as hot as the Sun. The planet from which we look at Teide 1 is located at a distance of approximately 6.5 million km from it. There is an atmosphere and even clouds, but it is too young for the origin of life. The luminary in the sky looks menacingly large, but in fact its diameter is only twice that of Jupiter. All brown dwarfs are about the size of Jupiter - the more massive ones are just denser. As for life on this planet, it most likely simply will not have time to develop in the short period of the active life of a star - it is measured for about three hundred million more years, after which it will slowly smolder for another billion years at a temperature of less than a thousand degrees and will no longer be considered star.

18. Spring in Phoenix.

This world is similar to Earth... but it is deserted. Perhaps, for some reason, life did not arise here, despite favorable conditions, or maybe life simply did not have time to give rise to developed forms and get out onto land.

19. Frozen world.

Some terrestrial planets may be located too far from the star to maintain a temperature acceptable for life on their surface. “Too far” in this case is a relative concept, it all depends on the composition of the atmosphere and the presence or absence of the greenhouse effect. There was a period in the history of our Earth (850-630 million years ago) when all of it was a continuous ice desert from pole to pole, and it was as cold at the equator as in modern Antarctica. By the time this global glaciation began, unicellular life already existed on Earth, and if volcanoes had not saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane over millions of years so that the ice began to melt, life on Earth would still be represented by bacteria huddling on rocky outcrops and in zones of volcanism

20. Ambler.

American artist Walter Myers (Walter Myers) was born in 1958, has been fond of astronomy since childhood. Thanks to his paintings, drawn in accordance with scientific data, we can admire the landscapes of other planets. Before you a selection of works by Myers with his informative comments.
Jupiter - satellite view of Europa

Dawn on Io

Solar eclipse on Callisto

It is the most distant of the four large moons of Jupiter. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice in half with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the matter of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, tidal interactions practically do not torment this satellite, so the surface ice can reach a hundred kilometers thick, and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image, we are looking at Jupiter from a position of about 5° from the north pole of Callisto.
The sun will soon emerge from behind the right edge of Jupiter; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of a giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish band behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner solar system, known to terrestrial observers as "zodiacal light"
Sunrise on Mercury

The disk of the sun from Mercury looks three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

Given the slow rotation of this planet, before that, for several weeks from the same point, it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon.
Triton

A full Neptune in the sky is the only source of light for Triton's night side. The thin line across Neptune's disk is its rings edge-on, and the dark circle is the shadow of Triton itself. The opposite edge of the depression in the middle plan is about 15 kilometers away.
Sunrise on Triton

"Summer" on Pluto

Ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet

Gliese 581

Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from earth
The main attraction of its system is the first exoplanet discovered by scientists Gliese 581 C within the "habitable zone" - that is, not too close and not too far from the star, so that liquid water could be on its surface. The surface temperature of the planet is from -3°C to +40°C, which means it can be habitable. Gravity on its surface is one and a half times higher than the earth, and the “year” is only 13 days.
As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to it on one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the luminary can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the size of the Sun in diameter and a hundred times dimmer.
planetars

Planetars or wandering planets are called planets that do not revolve around stars, but drift freely in interstellar space.
Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were ejected into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the galaxy, but they are nearly impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the planetary mass is 0.6-0.8 of the Earth's and higher, then it is able to retain an atmosphere around it that will trap the heat generated by its interior, and the temperature and pressure on the surface may even be acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface.
The globular cluster on the edge of which this planetary travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps, in its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole hiding. Globular clusters usually contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.
When a star like our Sun nears the end of its lifespan, it expands to more than 200 times its original diameter, becoming a red giant and destroying the system's inner planets.

Then, over several tens of thousands of years, the star episodically ejects its outer layers into space, sometimes forming concentric shells, after which a small, very hot core is left, which cools and contracts to become a white dwarf. Here we see the beginning of contraction - the star sheds the first of its gaseous shells. This ghostly sphere will gradually expand, eventually going far beyond the orbit of this planet - the "Pluto" of this star system, which spent almost its entire history - ten billion years - far away on its outskirts in the form of a dark dead ball covered with a layer of frozen gases.
For the last hundred million years, it has been bathed in streams of light and heat, melted nitrogen-methane ice formed the atmosphere, and rivers of real water flow on its surface. But soon - by astronomical standards - this planet will again plunge into darkness and cold - now forever.
gloomy landscape

Landscape of an unnamed planet drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar gas and dust cloud
The light from other stars is hidden, while the solar wind from the central luminary of the system “inflates” the material of the nebula, creating a bubble of relatively free space around the star, which is visible in the sky in the form of a bright spot with a diameter of about 160 million km - this is a tiny hole in dark cloud, the dimensions of which are measured in light years.
The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the lack of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface decreased so much that most of the atmosphere simply froze and fell in the form of snow. The life that once flourished here is gone.
sun in the sky

The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.
Discovered in 1995, Teide 1 is one of the brown dwarfs - tiny stars with a mass several tens of times smaller than the Sun - and is located four hundred light years from Earth in the Pleiades star cluster. Teide 1 has a mass about 55 times that of Jupiter and is considered quite large for a brown dwarf. and, therefore, hot enough to support the fusion of lithium in its depths, but it is not able to start the process of fusion of hydrogen nuclei, like our Sun. This substar has existed for probably only about 120 million years (compared to the 4500 million years of the Sun's existence), and burns at 2200°C - and not half as hot as the Sun. The planet from which we look at Teide 1 is located at a distance of approximately 6.5 million km from it. There is an atmosphere and even clouds, but it is too young for the origin of life.
The luminary in the sky looks menacingly large, but in fact its diameter is only twice that of Jupiter. All brown dwarfs are about the size of Jupiter - the more massive ones are just denser. As for life on this planet, it most likely simply will not have time to develop in the short period of the active life of a star - it is measured for about three hundred million more years, after which it will slowly smolder for another billion years at a temperature of less than a thousand degrees and will no longer be considered star.
Spring in Phoenix

frozen world

Some terrestrial planets may be located too far from the star to maintain a temperature acceptable for life on their surface. “Too far” in this case is a relative concept, it all depends on the composition of the atmosphere and the presence or absence of the greenhouse effect. There was a period in the history of our Earth (850-630 million years ago) when all of it was a continuous ice desert from pole to pole, and it was as cold at the equator as in modern Antarctica.
By the time this global glaciation began, unicellular life already existed on Earth, and if volcanoes had not saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane over millions of years so that the ice began to melt, life on Earth would still be represented by bacteria huddling on rocky outcrops and in areas of volcanism.
Ambler

(Total 20 photos)

Post sponsored by: River Cruises : River Cruise Schedule in 2012

1. Sunrise on Mars.

2. Dawn on Io.

3. Dawn on Mars

4. Solar eclipse on Callisto.

It is the most distant of the four large moons of Jupiter. It is smaller than Ganymede, but larger than Io and Europa. Callisto is also covered with a crust of ice in half with rocks, under which there is an ocean of water (the closer to the outskirts of the solar system, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the matter of the planets, and, therefore, water), however, tidal interactions practically do not torment this satellite, so the surface ice can reach a hundred kilometers thick, and there is no volcanism, so the presence of life here is unlikely. In this image, we are looking at Jupiter from a position of about 5° from the north pole of Callisto. The sun will soon emerge from behind the right edge of Jupiter; and its rays are refracted by the atmosphere of a giant planet. The blue dot to the left of Jupiter is the Earth, the yellowish one to the right is Venus, and to the right and above it is Mercury. The whitish band behind Jupiter is not the Milky Way, but a disk of gas and dust in the ecliptic plane of the inner solar system, known to terrestrial observers as the "zodiacal light"

5. Jupiter - satellite view of Europa.

6. Sunrise on Mercury.

The disk of the sun from Mercury looks three times larger than from Earth, and many times brighter, especially in the airless sky.

7. Given the slowness of the rotation of this planet, before that, for several weeks from the same point it was possible to observe the solar corona slowly creeping out from behind the horizon

8. Triton.

9. Sunrise on Triton looks no less impressive:

10. "Summer" on Pluto.

11. Dangerous dawn on Gliese 876d.

12. The ship of intelligent beings under the green sky of an unknown planet.

13. Gliese 581, also known as Wolf 562, is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Libra, at 20.4 sv. years from Earth.

The main attraction of its system is the first exoplanet discovered by scientists Gliese 581 C within the "habitable zone" - that is, not too close and not too far from the star for liquid water to be on its surface. The surface temperature of the planet is from -3°C to +40°C, which means it can be habitable. Gravity on its surface is one and a half times higher than the earth, and the "year" is only 13 days. As a result of such a close location relative to the star, Gliese 581 C is always turned to it on one side, so there is no change of day and night there (although the luminary can rise and fall relative to the horizon due to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the planetary axis). The star Gliese 581 is half the size of the Sun in diameter and a hundred times dimmer.

14. Planetars or wandering planets are called planets that do not revolve around stars, but freely drift in interstellar space. Some of them were formed, like stars, as a result of gravitational compression of gas and dust clouds, others arose, like ordinary planets, in star systems, but were ejected into interstellar space due to disturbances from neighboring planets. Planetars should be fairly common in the galaxy, but they are nearly impossible to detect, and most rogue planets will likely never be discovered. If the planetary mass is 0.6-0.8 of the Earth's and higher, then it is able to retain an atmosphere around it that will trap the heat generated by its interior, and the temperature and pressure on the surface can be even acceptable for life. Eternal night reigns on their surface. The globular cluster on the edge of which this planetary travels contains about 50,000 stars and is located not far from our own galaxy. Perhaps, in its center, as in the cores of many galaxies, there is a supermassive black hole hiding. Globular clusters usually contain very old stars, and this planet is also likely much older than Earth.

16. A gloomy landscape of an unnamed planet drifting along with its star system in the depths of a dense absorbing nebula - a huge interstellar gas and dust cloud.

The light from other stars is hidden, while the solar wind from the central luminary of the system “inflates” the material of the nebula, creating a bubble of relatively free space around the star, which is visible in the sky in the form of a bright spot with a diameter of about 160 million km - this is a tiny hole in dark cloud, the dimensions of which are measured in light years. The planet whose surface we see was once a geologically active world with a significant atmosphere - as evidenced by the lack of impact craters - but after sinking into the nebula, the amount of sunlight and heat reaching its surface was reduced so much that most of the atmosphere simply froze and fell in the form of snow. The life that once flourished here is gone.

17. The star in the sky of this Mars-like planet is Teide 1.

Discovered in 1995, Teide 1 is one of the brown dwarfs - tiny stars with a mass several tens of times smaller than the Sun - and is located four hundred light years from Earth in the Pleiades star cluster. Teide 1 has a mass about 55 times that of Jupiter and is considered quite large for a brown dwarf. and, therefore, hot enough to support the fusion of lithium in its depths, but it is not able to start the process of fusion of hydrogen nuclei, like our Sun. This substar has probably only existed for about 120 million years (compared to the 4500 million years of the Sun's existence), and burns at 2200°C - and not half as hot as the Sun. The planet from which we look at Teide 1 is located at a distance of approximately 6.5 million km from it. There is an atmosphere and even clouds, but it is too young for the origin of life. The luminary in the sky looks menacingly large, but in fact its diameter is only twice that of Jupiter. All brown dwarfs are about the size of Jupiter - the more massive ones are just denser. As for life on this planet, it most likely simply will not have time to develop in the short period of the active life of a star - it is measured for about three hundred million more years, after which it will slowly smolder for another billion years at a temperature of less than a thousand degrees and will no longer be considered star.

18. Spring in Phoenix.

19. Frozen world.

20. Ambler.

Portal for the student. Self-training

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