Emil's World

Cassini spies Mimas hiding in Saturn’s rings

Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / Gordan Ugarkovic

blog.ted.com

As part of TEDxCERN, physicists from the famous institution, home of  the Large Hadron Collider (and birthplace of the Word Wide Web), teamed up with animators from TED-Ed to create easy-to-understand animated lessons that explain concepts like dark matter, big data and the Higgs boson in lay terms.

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If astronomers could somehow pull planets out of the sky and analyze them in the laboratory, it might look something like this artistically altered image illustrating new research from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory allows astronomers to study closely the atmospheres of hot Jupiter planets — those outside our solar system that orbit near the blistering heat of their stars. In this image, an artistic version of a hot Jupiter inspired by computer simulations has been inserted into a photo showing a Spitzer researcher, Heather Knutson, in a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where she works. In reality, Knutson does not work in a lab, nor wear a lab coat and goggles, but scrutinizes telescope data from her office computer. Knutson is the co-author of a new study led by Nikole Lewis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. They used Spitzer to monitor a hot Jupiter, called HAT-P-2b, as it orbited all the way around its star in an eccentric, comet-like orbit. This allowed the team to watch the planet heat up as it moved closer to the star, and cool down as it moved away — almost like putting a Bunsen burner to a planet in a laboratory. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

• Atomic Model, 2008
• Helix with matchsticks, 2005
• Bouncing pen light, 2008
• Cube with Ruler and Penlight, 2007
• Fifteen Hours, 2006