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5/24/2017 The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See ­ WSJ

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The way David Delgado sees it, the exotic seashore on a newly discovered planet around a star called Trappist-1 would dazzle any tourist, not to mention the sight of six other alien worlds hanging in its sky like Christmas balls.

Mr. Delgado has never actually seen the planet. No one has. Astronomers who announced the discovery in February measured only the telltale wink of starlight as it passed in front of the cool reddish star 39 light years from Earth. But that hasn’t stopped Mr. Delgado and his colleagues at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from creating posters that extol the attractions of Trappist-1e—and other unseen worlds orbiting distant stars.

On a planet called Kepler-16b, for instance, which orbits two stars, a space-

suited Earthling revels in the novelty of casting two shadows, before a vista of red lands giving way to purple mountains beneath a tangerine sky.

Mr. Delgado is a visual strategist at The Studio of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one of the many artists, designers and illustrators working to produce a picture of the cosmos that in some ways doesn’t actually exist. “We are trying to present a plausible reality,” he says.

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A-HED

The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See As astronomers discover unseen worlds, illustrators do their best to capture a plausible reality without veering into science fiction; ‘a bit of a tug of war’

This illustration shows one possible scenario for the exoplanet called 55 Cancri e. PHOTO: NASA/JPL­CALTECH

Updated March 29, 2017 11:49 a.m. ET By Robert Lee Hotz

Trappist­1e

5/24/2017 The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See ­ WSJ

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Astronomers are finding thousands of worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. In the absence of direct images, the public knows these alien worlds only through lavish illustrations produced by NASA and by the observatories that discovered them, in an audacious blending of science and art.

So far, astronomers know the mass, density and orbits of the seven worlds around the Trappist-1 star. They haven’t detected water or atmospheres but several might be warm enough that, in theory, liquid water could exist there. So the artists added oceans to their illustrations, which are posted on NASA websites and republished in newspapers and magazines world-wide.

Sometimes, these visions spur arguments about artistic liberties and misleading first impressions. “They are assuming more about these planets than we can possibly, possibly know,” says planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and principal investigator for the space agency’s Psyche asteroid mission.

Other researchers worry about a public backlash if reality can’t live up to its image. “Ultimately there is a danger that it could backfire, when we spend billions of dollars building a telescope to examine those worlds more closely and discover that each one is a barren, crummy planet,” says astrobiologist Caleb Scharf at Columbia University in New York.

But when scientific understanding falls short, imagination will fill the void. Thus, a Trappist-1 exoplanet features seaside caverns of ice and meandering streams under cloudy skies, according to images released by NASA and the European Southern Observatory.

Kepler-22b—which might have a volatile liquid or gaseous shell—is shown as a cloud- swept swirl of turquoise-colored seas. The world cataloged as “55 Cancri e” first appeared in public as a planet composed of dazzling diamond crystals because scientists speculated it could be mostly carbon. Now, based on recent infrared readings, it is depicted as a world engulfed in fiery lava flows.

Astronomy relies on images to make data come to life. In their research, modern astronomers work with data recorded in infrared, ultraviolet, microwave, or X-ray wavelengths beyond the capacity of the human eye—or with subtle differences in light

This poster imagines a trip to Trappist­1e. PHOTO: NASA/JPL­CALTECH

An artist’s conception of Kepler­22b. PHOTO: NASA/AMES/JPL­CALTECH

5/24/2017 The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See ­ WSJ

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intensity that are too fine for the human eye to discern. A pixel may represent a single planet or a galaxy of a million stars.

While striving for accuracy, astronomers, too,

embellish the images of stars, nebulas and far away galaxies that they display to the general public, says Stanford University visual scholar Elizabeth Kessler, author of “Picturing The Cosmos.” Structure and colors in Hubble Space Telescope or Spitzer Space Telescope images, for example, may hew to scientific observations, but cosmic landmarks are enhanced digitally to be made brighter, bolder, and more florid.

“There is a bit of a tug of war between the artist and the astronomer,” says anthropologist Lisa Messeri at the University of Virginia, who studies how scientists transform planets into memorable places that capture public imagination. “It’s how data becomes worlds and how the inanimate becomes meaningful.”

When choosing colors for a planetary close-up, artists and astronomers can argue for days over “thousands of artistic choices,” says visualization artist Robert Hurt at the California Institute of Technology, who works on exoplanet illustrations for NASA with Caltech computer graphics expert Tim Pyle.

Don’t make the ocean too azure blue, lest it seem too much like Earth. Don’t ever use the color green, which hints at vegetation. “We try to avoid anything that might imply there is life,” Mr. Pyle says.

In illustrations of a Trappist-1 exoplanet, astronomers wanted the landscape dark red, to match the light from the red dwarf star it orbits. The artists objected. “Artistically, we are not fond of deep red because it washes out all the colors,” says Mr. Pyle.

Dr. Hurt studied the color temperature of the starlight. “It was more consistent with a low wattage lightbulb and not a red-hot burner on a stove,” he says. The scientists weren’t convinced. Then he compared the spectrum of starlight to the optical responses of the human eye. He argued that human eyes wouldn’t be able to see the red tint because it was too far into the infrared.

”The color is more like a salmon-orange and not a red,” he says.

Guided by that hue, Mr. Delgado’s team then made a poster that showed tourists arriving on the exoplanet, which is labeled the “best Hab Zone vacation within 12 parsecs of Earth.” They stylized the image to resemble a vintage travel poster from the 1930s and unveiled it during NASA’s public announcement of the discovery.

Within days, NASA and the European Southern Observatory posted 3-dimensional virtual reality tours offering different perspectives of the Trappist-1 worlds, based on artists’ conceptions.

“We are one step closer to the science fiction we all grew up on,” says Mr. Delgado. “It’s all coming true.”

An artist’s conception of the exoplanet Trappist­1f. PHOTO: NASA/JPL­CALTECH/T. PYLE (IPAC)

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5/24/2017 The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See ­ WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the­sky­is­orange­how­nasa­artists­draw­planets­no­one­can­see­1490800781 4/4

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@ wsj.com

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This copy is for your personal, non­commercial use only. To order presentation­ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.

An artist’s imagined view from the surface of a Trappist­1 planet. PHOTO: ESO/M. KORNMESSER