Featured Space Artist: Mark A. Garlick

Medium: digital

Here you see a pair of protoplanetary discs (“propyds” for short) forming inside the vast star factory known as the Orion Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope actually photographed these objects, which will one day become stars and, perhaps, planetary systems.

Medium: digital

Some planets do not have parent stars – they are vagabonds, such as this pair. Perhaps they planets were ejected during a supernova explosion, or during the close encounter of their original star with another one, close by.

Medium: digital

Proxima is the nearest star to the Sun. It is a dim red dwarf, smaller than our Sun and a great deal fainter. Here we see it from a hypothetical orbiting planet. To the right you can also make out Alpha Centauri, which is a binary star with two Sun-like components. The Alpha Centauri pair orbit each other quite closely, while Proxima orbits this pair much further out, forming a triple star system. I have exaggerated the brightness of the close binary pair for artistic reasons. Appears on the cover of the May 2003 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

Medium: digital

This is an artistic representation of a non-magnetic cataclysmic variable. It comprises a ref dwarf (left) in orbit around a white dwarf. The red dwarf has become tidally distorted because of the extreme gravity of its environment. Gas is pulled towards the white dwarf (too small to be seen on the scale of this image) and forms an accretion disc around it, on the right. Occasionally these discs flare up to produce novae or dwarf novae explosions – hence the name, cataclysmic variable.

Medium: digital

This is an impression of a brown dwarf, objects that are not quite stars and yet which are not planets either. This rendition shows one with Jupiter-like clouds. On the “day” side, high-altitude clouds catch the light and shine a bright magenta, while the deeper dark bands are less prominent. On the night side, those bright clouds now block the object’s internal heat and show up dark, whereas the deeper decks glow a dim red because of their heat. This gives a colour reversal effect from day to night.

Medium: digital

Titan is the subject of the Huygens probe, due to reach this Saturnian moon in early 2005. Perhaps this is what it will see: a landscape sopping with murky, frigid, liquid hydrocarbon seas, while similar substances rain from the thick air.

Medium: digital

Quaoar is a very large Kuiper-Belt object, a rocky and icy world orbiting near Pluto, discovered in 2003. This new worldlet, about half the size of Pluto, was the largest Solar System object found since the discovery of Pluto itself, until the announcement in March 2004 of a new Solar System member called Sedna. Sedna is three-quarters the size of Pluto but three times farther from the Sun. Both Sedna and Quaoar are so massive that they are thought to be spherical. This image could serve as an illustration of either object.

Medium: digital

Here is a view of the giant planet Jupiter from a vantage point somewhere above the surface of Europa, one of its icy moons. The Sun is right behind you but just below the moon’s horizon, so the light in this rendition is coming from Jupiter. Europa’s surface is a cracked layer of ice that looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The ice has been fractured because, probably, there is a sub-Europan ocean of liquid water constantly on the move beneath it.

Medium: digital

The planet around the star HD 209458 is somewhat special. It's being evaporated, eaten away bit by bit, its atmosphere stripped bare by the searing heat of its nearby star. The planet, HD 209458b, swings around its star in under four days, at a distance of only 7 million kilometres — barely ten per cent of the comparative gulf that separates the Sun from Mercury. There, the planet is rapidly being roasted, its atmosphere blasted away like the tail of a comet, 10,000 tons of it every second.

Medium: digital

This image shows the effect that a star going supernova would have on its planetary system, if any. The small planets shown, made of rock and metal, would probably have their outermost layers stripped off completely by the fury of the blast. This would probably happen to the moons of many of the known planetary systems to date, where a giant planet orbits its star very closely.