Then there was the time he illustrated Kepler 452b. He and his colleagues finally settled on a kind of muddy brown, instead of blue, so the water wouldn't look too inviting. "We didn't want the general public to see this artist's concept and walk away thinking: 'Wow, they've found another Earth!' " recalls Pyle, who tweaked the color of the water again and again.
It's a rocky planet that might have liquid water - or maybe not. Take a planet called Kepler 186f, for example.
You're going to make sure that whatever your artist's concept is, you're focusing on that water in some way."ĭepicting water isn't such a simple task. "If, you know, we find a planet that potentially has liquid water on its surface," Pyle says, "and, let's say, that's pretty rare. Scientists also usually know a lot about the star itself, and an artist can incorporate all of that into the image.īut there are still a lot of details that have to be filled in to create a plausible picture of what the planet might look like - and that can get tricky. Just by looking at a star, he says, "we're actually able to extrapolate quite a bit of information about, say, the number of planets that might be around it, their distance from the star, their size." "For us, it's quite the biggest compliment if people do confuse our illustrations for a real image," he jokes.Īrtists collaborate with scientists, who share what is and isn't known about far-off planets, says Tim Pyle, a graphic artist who used to work for Hollywood and now works at NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. It's up to writers and captions to explain what the image really is, Calçada says. "Many, many astronomers actually do see this danger on this kind of illustration," he says, "because it might create false images on people's minds." But there is a danger that many people sometimes do mistake some of these illustrations for real photos," agrees Luis Calçada, an artist with the European Southern Observatory's education and public outreach department. "The point of these illustrations is to create excitement, to grab the general public's attention. The artists say this work can drive home the idea that these planets truly exist - but, still, some people worry that the public might get the wrong idea. Over the last two decades, they've used these techniques to detect thousands of planets.Ĭreating popular images to show what the planets might look like has become something of a cottage industry. It's part of an ever-increasing gallery of images depicting real planets beyond our solar system that, in fact, no one has ever seen.Īstronomers detect these planets by looking for how a planet's gravity tugs on its star, or how a planet blocks a star's light.
But the alien scene was actually completely made-up. The picture of a craggy canyon, illuminated by a reddish-orange sunset, looked like an image that could have been taken on Mars by one of NASA's rovers. When scientists recently announced that they had discovered a new planet orbiting our closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centuri, they also released an artist's conception of the planet. This artist's impression shows a best guess of what the surface of the planet Proxima b might look like, as it orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system.