What if The Moon is Gone

When the Moon is gone

If the time of Earth’s existence was condensed into a 24-hour clock, the moon formation event occurred just 10 minutes after the Earth was born. The Earth formed 4.56 billion years ago, and the Moon formed about 30 million years later. At that time, the Earth was a magma ocean. An impactor about the size of Mars struck the Earth at an oblique angle, and removed some of the magmatic mantle. This mantle was put in orbit around the Earth, together with some of the debris from the impactor itself, and this material eventually formed the Moon.

When the Moon first formed, it was very close to the Earth. It was possibly only 20 to 30 thousands of kilometers away, and it would have looked extremely large in the sky, at least 20 to 10 times bigger. But there were no living creatures on the Earth at that time to witness this beautiful scene.

The tidal effect of a body increases as a cube of the distance, so the effect of the Moon’s tidal forcing on the Earth was extremely high at this time, to the point that the early magma ocean was affected. This provided some additional energy to the heating from radioactive elements present, but after the radiogenic heating decayed, the Moon still was a source of heating that may have had some geological effect, keeping the Earth’s magma hot and perhaps forcing additional convection in the Earth’s mantle.

After the Earth started to cool, the first crust started to float on top of the magma. During this period the Earth was subjected to increased meteor bombardment. The bombardment had been very intense at the beginning of the solar system and then had started to decline, but about 500 million years after the birth of the Earth, or about 2 hours and 40 minutes into our clock of 24 hours, there was a burst of impactors. This lasted for about hundred million years, and we call this “the late heavy bombardment.” Many of the large basins on the Moon are evidence of this late heavy bombardment period. In this way, the Moon is a history book for the inner solar system and the Earth. We have studied these basins with the SMART-1 mission.

The Earth was hit more often than the Moon, however, because Earth is larger and has more gravity. This increased gravity also caused the impactors to be accelerated to higher velocities towards the Earth. That must have been a catastrophic time to be here. So many bombardments would have sterilized the planet. If life had appeared before this period, it would have been extinguished unless it found a way to retreat into niches where it could be protected from these global catastrophes.

When some of these impactors hit the Earth, the explosion caused rocks and dirt from Earth to shoot up and away from our planet. Some of that projected material flew all over the solar system, and some of it landed on the Moon. There could be a few hundred kilograms of Earth material per square kilometer of the Moon’s surface, buried under a few meters of lunar soil. It would be interesting to retrieve those rocks and bring back samples of the early Earth. Almost nothing from this time period has survived on the Earth because of tectonic recycling of the crust plates or because of atmospheric weathering. We would try to detect some organics within those rocks, and that could tell us about the history of organic chemistry on Earth. Some of these rocks could even have preserved fossils of life. Such rocks could help us look further back into the fossil record, which now stops at 3.5 billion years ago. This way, we could possibly learn about the emergence of life on Earth.

By exploring the Moon, we also can get clues on how the Earth has evolved. We can study processes on the Moon that have also shaped the Earth, like volcanism and tectonics. Because the Moon is smaller than the Earth, the Moon’s radiogenic heating dissipated much faster. After about one billion years, the interior of the Moon didn’t evolve much, and surface changes mostly were due to impacts. There was a brief period of magmatic activity from the subsurface -- a few plumes of magma made their way up to the surface and filled newly formed impact basins with basalt, creating what we call the Maria. This happened up to about 2 billion years ago. Because the Moon offers different conditions than the Earth, we can better understand how physical processes work generally by studying a larger range of parameters than just the Earth’s.

The Moon affects the liquid envelope of the Earth, and the oceanic tides in particular. The Moon affects the ocean tides more in some areas than others. For instance, in the channel between the British Isles and the European continent, the tidal range can be 10 meters, compared to what you see in the Pacific, where it is below a meter.

The crust of the Earth is also affected. The Moon’s tidal forcing causes significant heating and dissipation of energy to take place. Part of this energy is heating the Earth, and part of it is dissipated by forcing the Moon to recede from the Earth over time. There are people who propose that the tidal effect of the Moon may have helped trigger the convection on the Earth that led to the multi-plate tectonics. The other planets don’t have the same tectonic cycle. For most of them, the crust is like a lid that doesn’t move much horizontally, and the magma and heat are blocked by this lid on the surface. The Earth instead has rolling convective motion that drags the crust, and then the crust plunges back down into the mantle and gets recycled.

There are some very subtle effects of the Moon in the climate and the oceans. One pattern that has been found recently is related to the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño phenomenon. You have a cold undersea current coming from the Antarctic sea, and that creates the Humboldt stream which keeps the sea around the South American coast near Peru and Chile quite cold. Because of this, there are fewer clouds and less precipitation there. Sometimes this current drifts away from the coast, and then you have much more cloud formation and a period of very bad weather over South America. Satellites have monitored this stream over the Pacific Ocean and they have found some streams which were not known before. They can connect some of these streams with how the Moon’s tidal effect influences the mixing of the deep ocean. There was a French-American mission called TOPEX/Poseidon that accurately measured the altitude of the sea and detected a little stream a few centimeters high. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but over the whole area of the Pacific Ocean it represents a huge amount of water transferred from one place to another.

If you would take away the Moon suddenly, it would change the global altitude of the ocean. Right now there is a distortion which is elongated around the equator, so if we didn’t have this effect, suddenly a lot of water would be redistributed toward the polar regions.

The Moon has been a stabilizing factor for the axis of rotation of the Earth. If you look at Mars, for instance, that planet has wobbled quite dramatically on its axis over time due to the gravitational influence of all the other planets in the solar system. Because of this obliquity change, the ice that is now at the poles on Mars would sometimes drift to the equator. But the Earth’s moon has helped stabilize our planet so that its axis of rotation stays in the same direction. For this reason, we had much less climatic change than if the Earth had been alone. And this has changed the way life evolved on Earth, allowing for the emergence of more complex multi-cellular organisms compared to a planet where drastic climatic change would allow only small, robust organisms to survive.

The Moon has influenced biology in other ways as well. For species living near the coast, the tide is an important factor. When you look at the shorelines, you can recognize different layers of organisms that have adapted to the salt water conditions based on the ebb and flow of the tide.

The eyesight of many mammals is sensitive to moonlight. The level of adaptation of night vision would be very different without the Moon. Many of these species have evolved in such a way that their night vision could work in even partial lunar illumination, because that’s when they are most active. But they can be more subjected to predators, too, so there is a balance between your ability to see and your ability not to be seen. The Moon has completely changed evolution in that aspect.

Human vision is so sensitive that we are almost able to work by the light of the Milky Way. The full Moon has more light than we need to see at night. For most of our history, we were hunting and fishing or doing agriculture, and we organized our lives by using the Moon. It determined the time for hunting, or the time where we could harvest. That’s why most of our calendars are based on the Moon.

In a recent workshop called “Earth-Moon Relationships,” psychologists discussed the relation between the lunar phases and several aspects of life. There was a very interesting correlation, not with the birth of children, but with the time of conception. Perhaps that is due to some social or sentimental value of the Moon. We tend to forget the impact the Moon has on our lives because we use electric lights, but for most of our history we had to adapt our behavior to the lunar phases.

Finally, the Moon had a key role in the emergence of science, and in our understanding of our place in the universe. We saw the repetition of the phenomena of lunar phases, and we observed solar and lunar eclipses. These were big challenges to our understanding of nature, and a few astronomers were put to death because they weren’t able to predict the eclipses. This challenged us to develop accurate predictions for the motion of the sun and the motion of the Moon.

Studying the Moon helped us determine distances in the solar system and the size of celestial objects. By studying lunar phases, for example, people were able to determine how far the Moon is from the Earth, the size of the Earth, and our distance from the sun. More recently, the Moon was the terrain where the space race took place between two political systems, allowing for great technical and scientific achievements. The Moon has inspired humankind to learn how to travel to space, and to bring life beyond Earth’s cradle.

Neptune

Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun and the fourth largest (by diameter). Neptune is smaller in diameter but larger in mass than Uranus.

        orbit:    4,504,000,000 km (30.06 AU) from Sun
        diameter: 49,532 km (equatorial)
        mass:     1.0247e26 kg

In Roman mythology Neptune (Greek: Poseidon) was the god of the Sea.

After the discovery of Uranus, it was noticed that its orbit was not as it should be in accordance with Newton's laws. It was therefore predicted that another more distant planet must be perturbing Uranus' orbit. Neptune was first observed by Galle and d'Arrest on 1846 Sept 23 very near to the locations independently predicted by Adams and Le Verrier from calculations based on the observed positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. An international dispute arose between the English and French (though not, apparently between Adams and Le Verrier personally) over priority and the right to name the new planet; they are now jointly credited with Neptune's discovery. Subsequent observations have shown that the orbits calculated by Adams and Le Verrier diverge from Neptune's actual orbit fairly quickly. Had the search for the planet taken place a few years earlier or later it would not have been found anywhere near the predicted location.


More than two centuries earlier, in 1613, Galileo observed Neptune when it happened to be very near Jupiter, but he thought it was just a star. On two successive nights he actually noticed that it moved slightly with respect to another nearby star. But on the subsequent nights it was out of his field of view. Had he seen it on the previous few nights Neptune's motion would have been obvious to him. But, alas, cloudy skies prevented obsevations on those few critical days.


Neptune has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2 on Aug 25 1989. Much of we know about Neptune comes from this single encounter. But fortunately, recent ground-based and HST observations have added a great deal, too.


Because Pluto's orbit is so eccentric, it sometimes crosses the orbit of Neptune making Neptune the most distant planet from the Sun for a few years.


Neptune's composition is probably similar to Uranus': various "ices" and rock with about 15% hydrogen and a little helium. Like Uranus, but unlike Jupiter and Saturn, it may not have a distinct internal layering but rather to be more or less uniform in composition. But there is most likely a small core (about the mass of the Earth) of rocky material. Its atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium with a small amount of methane.


Neptune's blue color is largely the result of absorption of red light by methane in the atmosphere but there is some additional as-yet-unidentified chromophore which gives the clouds their rich blue tint.


Like a typical gas planet, Neptune has rapid winds confined to bands of latitude and large storms or vortices. Neptune's winds are the fastest in the solar system, reaching 2000 km/hour.


Like Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune has an internal heat source -- it radiates more than twice as much energy as it receives from the Sun.


At the time of the Voyager encounter, Neptune's most prominent feature was the Great Dark Spot (left) in the southern hemisphere. It was about half the size as Jupiter's Great Red Spot (about the same diameter as Earth). Neptune's winds blew the Great Dark Spot westward at 300 meters/second (700 mph). Voyager 2 also saw a smaller dark spot in the southern hemisphere and a small irregular white cloud that zips around Neptune every 16 hours or so now known as "The Scooter" (right). It may be a plume rising from lower in the atmosphere but its true nature remains a mystery.


However, HST observations of Neptune (left) in 1994 show that the Great Dark Spot has disappeared! It has either simply dissipated or is currently being masked by other aspects of the atmosphere. A few months later HST discovered a new dark spot in Neptune's northern hemisphere. This indicates that Neptune's atmosphere changes rapidly, perhaps due to slight changes in the temperature differences between the tops and bottoms of the clouds.


Neptune also has rings. Earth-based observations showed only faint arcs instead of complete rings, but Voyager 2's images showed them to be complete rings with bright clumps. One of the rings appears to have a curious twisted structure (right).


Like Uranus and Jupiter, Neptune's rings are very dark but their composition is unknown.


Neptune's rings have been given names: the outermost is Adams (which contains three prominent arcs now named Liberty, Equality and Fraternity), next is an unnamed ring co-orbital with Galatea, then Leverrier (whose outer extensions are called Lassell and Arago), and finally the faint but broad Galle.


Neptune's magnetic field is, like Uranus', oddly oriented and probably generated by motions of conductive material (probably water) in its middle layers.


Neptune can be seen with binoculars (if you know exactly where to look) but a large telescope is needed to see anything other than a tiny disk. There are several Web sites that show the current position of Neptune (and the other planets) in the sky, but much more detailed charts will be required to actually find it. Such charts can be created with a planetarium program.



Neptune's Satellites

Neptune has 13 known moons; 7 small named ones and Triton plus four discovered in 2002 and one discovered in 2003.
           Distance  Radius    Mass
Satellite  (000 km)   (km)     (kg)   Discoverer   Date
---------  --------  ------  -------  ----------  -----
Naiad            48      29      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Thalassa         50      40      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Despina          53      74      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Galatea          62      79      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Larissa          74      96      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Proteus         118     209      ?    Voyager 2    1989
Triton          355    1350  2.14e22  Lassell      1846
Nereid         5509     170      ?    Kuiper       1949
Halimede      15728      61      ?                 2002 
Sao           22422      40      ?                 2002 
Laomedeia     23571      40      ?                 2002 
Psamathe      46695      38      ?                 2003 
Neso          48387      60      ?                 2002 





Neptune's Rings

         Distance   Width
Ring       (km)      (km)     aka
-------  --------   -----   -------
Diffuse    41900       15   1989N3R, Galle
Inner      53200       15   1989N2R, LeVerrier
Plateau    53200     5800   1989N4R, Lassell, Arago
Main       62930     < 50   1989N1R, Adams

(distance is from Neptune's center to the ring's inner edge)






More about Neptune and its satellites





more Neptune images
from NSSDC
Changing seasons on Neptune
Neptune's Ring System
Voyager Neptune Science Summary from JPL
Neptunian System Nomenclature Tables
more on the 2002 moons
data on the moons discovered in 2002
Data on the newly discovered moons can be found at JPL and Scott Sheppard's site.





Open Issues


Neptune's magnetic field is off center and at a large angle to its rotation axis. What processes in the interior generate this oddly shaped field?
What accounts for the relative lack of hydrogen and helium in Neptune (and Uranus)?
Why are Neptune's winds so strong in spite of the fact that it is so far from the Sun and has a relatively weak internal heat source?
What happened to the Great Dark Spot?
Can we design a useful Neptune orbiter mission cheap enough to be funded?

Uranus

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the third largest (by diameter). Uranus is larger in diameter but smaller in mass than Neptune.

        orbit:    2,870,990,000 km (19.218 AU) from Sun
        diameter: 51,118 km (equatorial)
        mass:     8.683e25 kg

Careful pronunciation may be necessary to avoid embarrassment; say "YOOR a nus", not "your anus" or "urine us".

Uranus is the ancient Greek deity of the Heavens, the earliest supreme god. Uranus was the son and mate of Gaia the father of Cronus (Saturn) and of the Cyclopes and Titans (predecessors of the Olympian gods).

Uranus, the first planet discovered in modern times, was discovered by William Herschel while systematically searching the sky with his telescope on March 13, 1781. It had actually been seen many times before but ignored as simply another star (the earliest recorded sighting was in 1690 when John Flamsteed cataloged it as 34 Tauri). Herschel named it "the Georgium Sidus" (the Georgian Planet) in honor of his patron, the infamous (to Americans) King George III of England; others called it "Herschel". The name "Uranus" was first proposed by Bode in conformity with the other planetary names from classical mythology but didn't come into common use until 1850.

Uranus has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2 on Jan 24 1986.

Most of the planets spin on an axis nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic but Uranus' axis is almost parallel to the ecliptic. At the time of Voyager 2's passage, Uranus' south pole was pointed almost directly at the Sun. This results in the odd fact that Uranus' polar regions receive more energy input from the Sun than do its equatorial regions. Uranus is nevertheless hotter at its equator than at its poles. The mechanism underlying this is unknown.

Actually, there's an ongoing battle over which of Uranus' poles is its north pole! Either its axial inclination is a bit over 90 degrees and its rotation is direct, or it's a bit less than 90 degrees and the rotation is retrograde. The problem is that you need to draw a dividing line *somewhere*, because in a case like Venus there is little dispute that the rotation is indeed retrograde (not a direct rotation with an inclination of nearly 180).

Uranus is composed primarily of rock and various ices, with only about 15% hydrogen and a little helium (in contrast to Jupiter and Saturn which are mostly hydrogen). Uranus (and Neptune) are in many ways similar to the cores of Jupiter and Saturn minus the massive liquid metallic hydrogen envelope. It appears that Uranus does not have a rocky core like Jupiter and Saturn but rather that its material is more or less uniformly distributed.

Uranus' atmosphere is about 83% hydrogen, 15% helium and 2% methane.

Like the other gas planets, Uranus has bands of clouds that blow around rapidly. But they are extremely faint, visible only with radical image enhancement of the Voyager 2 pictures (right). Recent observations with HST (left) show larger and more pronounced streaks. Further HST observations show even more activity. Uranus is no longer the bland boring planet that Voyager saw! It now seems clear that the differences are due to seasonal effects since the Sun is now at a lower Uranian latitude which may cause more pronounced day/night weather effects. By 2007 the Sun will be directly over Uranus's equator.





Uranus' blue color is the result of absorption of red light by methane in the upper atmosphere. There may be colored bands like Jupiter's but they are hidden from view by the overlaying methane layer.

Like the other gas planets, Uranus has rings. Like Jupiter's, they are very dark but like Saturn's they are composed of fairly large particles ranging up to 10 meters in diameter in addition to fine dust. There are 13 known rings, all very faint; the brightest is known as the Epsilon ring. The Uranian rings were the first after Saturn's to be discovered. This was of considerable importance since we now know that rings are a common feature of planets, not a peculiarity of Saturn alone.

Voyager 2 discovered 10 small moons in addition to the 5 large ones already known. It is likely that there are several more tiny satellites within the rings.

Uranus' magnetic field is odd in that it is not centered on the center of the planet and is tilted almost 60 degrees with respect to the axis of rotation. It is probably generated by motion at relatively shallow depths within Uranus.

Uranus is sometimes just barely visible with the unaided eye on a very clear night; it is fairly easy to spot with binoculars (if you know exactly where to look). A small astronomical telescope will show a small disk. There are several Web sites that show the current position of Uranus (and the other planets) in the sky, but much more detailed charts will be required to actually find it. Such charts can be created with a planetarium program.


Uranus' Satellites
Uranus has 27 named moons:

Unlike the other bodies in the solar system which have names from classical mythology, Uranus' moons take their names from the writings of Shakespeare and Pope.
They form three distinct classes: the 11 small very dark inner ones discovered by Voyager 2, the 5 large ones (right), and the newly discovered much more distant ones.
Most have nearly circular orbits in the plane of Uranus' equator (and hence at a large angle to the plane of the ecliptic); the outer 4 are much more elliptical.

           Distance  Radius    Mass
Satellite  (000 km)   (km)     (kg)   Discoverer   Date
---------  --------  ------  -------  ----------  -----
Cordelia         50      13    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Ophelia          54      16    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Bianca           59      22    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Cressida         62      33    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Desdemona        63      29    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Juliet           64      42    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Portia           66      55    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Rosalind         70      27    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Cupid            75       6    ?      Showalter    2003
Belinda          75      34    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Perdita          76      40    ?      Voyager 2    1986
Puck             86      77    ?      Voyager 2    1985
Mab              98       8    ?      Showalter    2003
Miranda         130     236  6.30e19  Kuiper       1948
Ariel           191     579  1.27e21  Lassell      1851
Umbriel         266     585  1.27e21  Lassell      1851
Titania         436     789  3.49e21  Herschel     1787
Oberon          583     761  3.03e21  Herschel     1787
Francisco      4281       6    ?      Sheppard     2003
Caliban        7169      40    ?      Gladman      1997
Stephano       7948      15    ?      Gladman      1999
Trinculo       8578       5    ?      Holman       2001
Sycorax       12213      80    ?      Nicholson    1997
Margaret      14689       6    ?      Sheppard     2003
Prospero      16568      20    ?      Holman       1999
Setebos       17681      20    ?      Kavelaars    1999
Ferdinand     21000       6    ?      Sheppard     2003



Uranus' Rings
         Distance   Width
Ring       (km)      (km)
-------  --------   -----
1986U2R    38000    2,500
6          41840    1-3
5          42230    2-3
4          42580    2-3
Alpha      44720    7-12
Beta       45670    7-12
Eta        47190    0-2
Gamma      47630    1-4
Delta      48290    3-9
1986U1R    50020    1-2
Epsilon    51140    20-100

(distance is from Uranus' center to the ring's inner edge)

Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest:

        orbit:    1,429,400,000 km (9.54 AU) from Sun
        diameter: 120,536 km (equatorial)
        mass:     5.68e26 kg


In Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture. The associated Greek god, Cronus, was the son of Uranus and Gaia and the father of Zeus (Jupiter). Saturn is the root of the English word "Saturday" (see Appendix 5).

Saturn has been known since prehistoric times. Galileo was the first to observe it with a telescope in 1610; he noted its odd appearance but was confused by it. Early observations of Saturn were complicated by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn's rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit. A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes drastically. It was not until 1659 that Christiaan Huygens correctly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn's rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around Uranus (and shortly thereafter around Jupiter and Neptune).

Saturn was first visited by NASA's Pioneer 11 in 1979 and later by Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Cassini (a joint NASA / ESA project) arrived on July 1, 2004 and will orbit Saturn for at least four years.

Saturn is visibly flattened (oblate) when viewed through a small telescope; its equatorial and polar diameters vary by almost 10% (120,536 km vs. 108,728 km). This is the result of its rapid rotation and fluid state. The other gas planets are also oblate, but not so much so.

Saturn is the least dense of the planets; its specific gravity (0.7) is less than that of water.

Like Jupiter, Saturn is about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium with traces of water, methane, ammonia and "rock", similar to the composition of the primordial Solar Nebula from which the solar system was formed.

Saturn's interior is similar to Jupiter's consisting of a rocky core, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer and a molecular hydrogen layer. Traces of various ices are also present.

Saturn's interior is hot (12000 K at the core) and Saturn radiates more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. Most of the extra energy is generated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism as in Jupiter. But this may not be sufficient to explain Saturn's luminosity; some additional mechanism may be at work, perhaps the "raining out" of helium deep in Saturn's interior.

The bands so prominent on Jupiter are much fainter on Saturn. They are also much wider near the equator. Details in the cloud tops are invisible from Earth so it was not until the Voyager encounters that any detail of Saturn's atmospheric circulation could be studied. Saturn also exhibits long-lived ovals (red spot at center of image at right) and other features common on Jupiter. In 1990, HST observed an enormous white cloud near Saturn's equator which was not present during the Voyager encounters; in 1994 another, smaller storm was observed (left).

Two prominent rings (A and B) and one faint ring (C) can be seen from the Earth. The gap between the A and B rings is known as the Cassini division. The much fainter gap in the outer part of the A ring is known as the Encke Division (but this is somewhat of a misnomer since it was very likely never seen by Encke). The Voyager pictures show four additional faint rings. Saturn's rings, unlike the rings of the other planets, are very bright (albedo 0.2 - 0.6).

Though they look continuous from the Earth, the rings are actually composed of innumerable small particles each in an independent orbit. They range in size from a centimeter or so to several meters. A few kilometer-sized objects are also likely.

Saturn's rings are extraordinarily thin: though they're 250,000 km or more in diameter they're less than one kilometer thick. Despite their impressive appearance, there's really very little material in the rings -- if the rings were compressed into a single body it would be no more than 100 km across.

The ring particles seem to be composed primarily of water ice, but they may also include rocky particles with icy coatings.

Voyager confirmed the existence of puzzling radial inhomogeneities in the rings called "spokes" which were first reported by amateur astronomers (left). Their nature remains a mystery, but may have something to do with Saturn's magnetic field.

Saturn's outermost ring, the F-ring, is a complex structure made up of several smaller rings along which "knots" are visible. Scientists speculate that the knots may be clumps of ring material, or mini moons. The strange braided appearance visible in the Voyager 1 images (right) is not seen in the Voyager 2 images perhaps because Voyager 2 imaged regions where the component rings are roughly parallel. They are prominent in the Cassini images which also show some as yet unexplained wispy spiral structures.

There are complex tidal resonances between some of Saturn's moons and the ring system: some of the moons, the so-called "shepherding satellites" (i.e. Atlas, Prometheus and Pandora) are clearly important in keeping the rings in place; Mimas seems to be responsible for the paucity of material in the Cassini division, which seems to be similar to the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt; Pan is located inside the Encke Division and S/2005 S1 is in the center of the Keeler Gap. The whole system is very complex and as yet poorly understood.

The origin of the rings of Saturn (and the other jovian planets) is unknown. Though they may have had rings since their formation, the ring systems are not stable and must be regenerated by ongoing processes, perhaps the breakup of larger satellites. The current set of rings may be only a few hundred million years old.

Like the other jovian planets, Saturn has a significant magnetic field.

When it is in the nighttime sky, Saturn is easily visible to the unaided eye. Though it is not nearly as bright as Jupiter, it is easy to identify as a planet because it doesn't "twinkle" like the stars do. The rings and the larger satellites are visible with a small astronomical telescope. There are several Web sites that show the current position of Saturn (and the other planets) in the sky. More detailed and customized charts can be created with a planetarium program.

Saturn's Satellites

Saturn has 53 named satellites (as of spring 2010):
The three pairs Mimas-Tethys, Enceladus-Dione and Titan-Hyperion interact gravitationally in such a way as to maintain stable relationships between their orbits: the period of Mimas' orbit is exactly half that of Tethys, they are thus said to be in a 1:2 resonance; Enceladus-Dione are also 1:2; Titan-Hyperion are in a 3:4 resonance.
See Scott Sheppard's site for the latest about recently discovered moons (there are lots).
There are 9 more that have been discovered but as yet not named.

Major moons: 
           Distance  Radius    Mass
Satellite  (000 km)   (km)     (kg)   Discoverer   Date
---------  --------  ------  -------  ----------  -----
Pan             134      10     ?     Showalter    1990
Atlas           138      14     ?     Terrile      1980
Prometheus      139      46  2.70e17  Collins      1980
Pandora         142      46  2.20e17  Collins      1980
Epimetheus      151      57  5.60e17  Walker       1980
Janus           151      89  2.01e18  Dollfus      1966
Mimas           186     196  3.80e19  Herschel     1789
Enceladus       238     260  8.40e19  Herschel     1789
Tethys          295     530  7.55e20  Cassini      1684
Telesto         295      15     ?     Reitsema     1980
Calypso         295      13     ?     Pascu        1980
Dione           377     560  1.05e21  Cassini      1684
Helene          377      16     ?     Laques       1980
Rhea            527     765  2.49e21  Cassini      1672
Titan          1222    2575  1.35e23  Huygens      1655
Hyperion       1481     143  1.77e19  Bond         1848
Iapetus        3561     730  1.88e21  Cassini      1671
Phoebe        12952     110  4.00e18  Pickering    1898






Saturn's Rings
                  Radius   Radius             approx.   approx.
Name               inner    outer     width  position  mass (kg)
----              ------   ------     -----  --------  --------
D-Ring            67,000   74,500     7,500    (ring)
Guerin Division   
C-Ring            74,500   92,000    17,500    (ring)  1.1e18
Maxwell Division  87,500   88,000       500  (divide)
B-Ring            92,000  117,500    25,500    (ring)  2.8e19
Cassini Division 115,800  120,600     4,800  (divide)
Huygens Gap      117,680    (n/a)   285-440  (subdiv)
A-Ring           122,200  136,800    14,600    (ring)  6.2e18
Encke Minima     126,430  129,940     3,500   29%-53%
Encke Division   133,410  133,740
Keeler Gap       136,510  136,550
F-Ring           140,210             30-500   (ring)
G-Ring           165,800  173,800     8,000    (ring)  1e7?
E-Ring           180,000  480,000   300,000    (ring)

Notes:
  * distance is kilometers from Saturn's center
  * the "Encke Minima" is a slang term used by amateur astronomers, not an official IAU designation

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest. Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the    other planets combined (the mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth).
        orbit:    778,330,000 km (5.20 AU) from Sun
        diameter: 142,984 km (equatorial)
        mass:     1.900e27 kg

Jupiter (a.k.a. Jove; Greek Zeus) was the King of the Gods, the ruler of Olympus and the patron of the Roman state. Zeus was the son of Cronus (Saturn).

Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, the Moon and Venus). It has been known since prehistoric times as a bright "wandering star". But in 1610 when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky he discovered Jupiter's four large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (now known as the Galilean moons) and recorded their motions back and forth around Jupiter. This was the first discovery of a center of motion not apparently centered on the Earth. It was a major point in favor of Copernicus's heliocentric theory of the motions of the planets (along with other new evidence from his telescope: the phases of Venus and the mountains on the Moon). Galileo's outspoken support of the Copernican theory got him in trouble with the Inquisition. Today anyone can repeat Galileo's observations (without fear of retribution :-) using binoculars or an inexpensive telescope.

Jupiter was first visited by Pioneer 10 in 1973 and later by Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Ulysses. The spacecraft Galileo orbited Jupiter for eight years. It is still regularly observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The gas planets do not have solid surfaces, their gaseous material simply gets denser with depth (the radii and diameters quoted for the planets are for levels corresponding to a pressure of 1 atmosphere). What we see when looking at these planets is the tops of clouds high in their atmospheres (slightly above the 1 atmosphere level).

Jupiter is about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium (by numbers of atoms, 75/25% by mass) with traces of methane, water, ammonia and "rock". This is very close to the composition of the primordial Solar Nebula from which the entire solar system was formed. Saturn has a similar composition, but Uranus and Neptune have much less hydrogen and helium.

Our knowledge of the interior of Jupiter (and the other gas planets) is highly indirect and likely to remain so for some time. (The data from Galileo's atmospheric probe goes down only about 150 km below the cloud tops.)

Jupiter probably has a core of rocky material amounting to something like 10 to 15 Earth-masses.

Above the core lies the main bulk of the planet in the form of liquid metallic hydrogen. This exotic form of the most common of elements is possible only at pressures exceeding 4 million bars, as is the case in the interior of Jupiter (and Saturn). Liquid metallic hydrogen consists of ionized protons and electrons (like the interior of the Sun but at a far lower temperature). At the temperature and pressure of Jupiter's interior hydrogen is a liquid, not a gas. It is an electrical conductor and the source of Jupiter's magnetic field. This layer probably also contains some helium and traces of various "ices".

The outermost layer is composed primarily of ordinary molecular hydrogen and helium which is liquid in the interior and gaseous further out. The atmosphere we see is just the very top of this deep layer. Water, carbon dioxide, methane and other simple molecules are also present in tiny amounts.

Recent experiments have shown that hydrogen does not change phase suddenly. Therefore the interiors of the jovian planets probably have indistinct boundaries between their various interior layers.

Three distinct layers of clouds are believed to exist consisting of ammonia ice, ammonium hydrosulfide and a mixture of ice and water. However, the preliminary results from the Galileo probe show only faint indications of clouds (one instrument seems to have detected the topmost layer while another may have seen the second). But the probe's entry point (left) was unusual -- Earth-based telescopic observations and more recent observations by the Galileo orbiter suggest that the probe entry site may well have been one of the warmest and least cloudy areas on Jupiter at that time.

Data from the Galileo atmospheric probe also indicate that there is much less water than expected. The expectation was that Jupiter's atmosphere would contain about twice the amount of oxygen (combined with the abundant hydrogen to make water) as the Sun. But it now appears that the actual concentration much less than the Sun's. Also surprising was the high temperature and density of the uppermost parts of the atmosphere.

Jupiter and the other gas planets have high velocity winds which are confined in wide bands of latitude. The winds blow in opposite directions in adjacent bands. Slight chemical and temperature differences between these bands are responsible for the colored bands that dominate the planet's appearance. The light colored bands are called zones; the dark ones belts. The bands have been known for some time on Jupiter, but the complex vortices in the boundary regions between the bands were first seen by Voyager. The data from the Galileo probe indicate that the winds are even faster than expected (more than 400 mph) and extend down into as far as the probe was able to observe; they may extend down thousands of kilometers into the interior. Jupiter's atmosphere was also found to be quite turbulent. This indicates that Jupiter's winds are driven in large part by its internal heat rather than from solar input as on Earth.

The vivid colors seen in Jupiter's clouds are probably the result of subtle chemical reactions of the trace elements in Jupiter's atmosphere, perhaps involving sulfur whose compounds take on a wide variety of colors, but the details are unknown.

The colors correlate with the cloud's altitude: blue lowest, followed by browns and whites, with reds highest. Sometimes we see the lower layers through holes in the upper ones.

The Great Red Spot (GRS) has been seen by Earthly observers for more than 300 years (its discovery is usually attributed to Cassini, or Robert Hooke in the 17th century). The GRS is an oval about 12,000 by 25,000 km, big enough to hold two Earths. Other smaller but similar spots have been known for decades. Infrared observations and the direction of its rotation indicate that the GRS is a high-pressure region whose cloud tops are significantly higher and colder than the surrounding regions. Similar structures have been seen on Saturn and Neptune. It is not known how such structures can persist for so long.

Jupiter radiates more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. The interior of Jupiter is hot: the core is probably about 20,000 K. The heat is generated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism, the slow gravitational compression of the planet. (Jupiter does NOT produce energy by nuclear fusion as in the Sun; it is much too small and hence its interior is too cool to ignite nuclear reactions.) This interior heat probably causes convection deep within Jupiter's liquid layers and is probably responsible for the complex motions we see in the cloud tops. Saturn and Neptune are similar to Jupiter in this respect, but oddly, Uranus is not.

Jupiter is just about as large in diameter as a gas planet can be. If more material were to be added, it would be compressed by gravity such that the overall radius would increase only slightly. A star can be larger only because of its internal (nuclear) heat source. (But Jupiter would have to be at least 80 times more massive to become a star.)

Jupiter has a huge magnetic field, much stronger than Earth's. Its magnetosphere extends more than 650 million km (past the orbit of Saturn!). (Note that Jupiter's magnetosphere is far from spherical -- it extends "only" a few million kilometers in the direction toward the Sun.) Jupiter's moons therefore lie within its magnetosphere, a fact which may partially explain some of the activity on Io. Unfortunately for future space travelers and of real concern to the designers of the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft, the environment near Jupiter contains high levels of energetic particles trapped by Jupiter's magnetic field. This "radiation" is similar to, but much more intense than, that found within Earth's Van Allen belts. It would be immediately fatal to an unprotected human being.      The Galileo atmospheric probe discovered a new intense radiation belt between Jupiter's ring and the uppermost atmospheric layers. This new belt is approximately 10 times as strong as Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. Surprisingly, this new belt was also found to contain high energy helium ions of unknown origin.

Jupiter has rings like Saturn's, but much fainter and smaller (right). They were totally unexpected and were only discovered when two of the Voyager 1 scientists insisted that after traveling 1 billion km it was at least worth a quick look to see if any rings might be present. Everyone else thought that the chance of finding anything was nil, but there they were. It was a major coup. They have since been imaged in the infra-red from ground-based observatories and by Galileo.

Unlike Saturn's, Jupiter's rings are dark (albedo about .05). They're probably composed of very small grains of rocky material. Unlike Saturn's rings, they seem to contain no ice.

Particles in Jupiter's rings probably don't stay there for long (due to atmospheric and magnetic drag). The Galileo spacecraft found clear evidence that the rings are continuously resupplied by dust formed by micrometeor impacts on the four inner moons, which are very energetic because of Jupiter's large gravitational field. The inner halo ring is broadened by interactions with Jupiter's magnetic field.

In July 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter with spectacular results (left). The effects were clearly visible even with amateur telescopes. The debris from the collision was visible for nearly a year afterward with HST.

When it is in the nighttime sky, Jupiter is often the brightest "star" in the sky (it is second only to Venus, which is seldom visible in a dark sky). The four Galilean moons are easily visible with binoculars; a few bands and the Great Red Spot can be seen with a small astronomical telescope. There are several Web sites that show the current position of Jupiter (and the other planets) in the sky. More detailed and customized charts can be created with a planetarium program.


Jupiter's Satellites

Jupiter has 63 known satellites (as of Feb 2004): the four large Galilean moons plus many more small ones some of which have not yet been named:
Jupiter is very gradually slowing down due to the tidal drag produced by the Galilean satellites. Also, the same tidal forces are changing the orbits of the moons, very slowly forcing them farther from Jupiter.
Io, Europa and Ganymede are locked together in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance and their orbits evolve together. Callisto is almost part of this as well. In a few hundred million years, Callisto will be locked in too, orbiting at exactly twice the period of Ganymede (eight times the period of  Io).
Jupiter's satellites are named for other figures in the life of Zeus (mostly his numerous lovers).
Many more small moons have been discovered recently but have not as yet been officially confirmed or named. The most up to date info on them can be found at Scott Sheppard's site.

 Distance  Radius    Mass
Satellite  (000 km)   (km)     (kg)   Discoverer   Date
---------  --------  ------  -------  ----------  -----
Metis           128      20  9.56e16  Synnott      1979
Adrastea        129      10  1.91e16  Jewitt       1979
Amalthea        181      98  7.17e18  Barnard      1892
Thebe           222      50  7.77e17  Synnott      1979
Io              422    1815  8.94e22  Galileo      1610
Europa          671    1569  4.80e22  Galileo      1610
Ganymede       1070    2631  1.48e23  Galileo      1610
Callisto       1883    2400  1.08e23  Galileo      1610
Leda          11094       8  5.68e15  Kowal        1974
Himalia       11480      93  9.56e18  Perrine      1904
Lysithea      11720      18  7.77e16  Nicholson    1938
Elara         11737      38  7.77e17  Perrine      1905
Ananke        21200      15  3.82e16  Nicholson    1951
Carme         22600      20  9.56e16  Nicholson    1938
Pasiphae      23500      25  1.91e17  Melotte      1908
Sinope        23700      18  7.77e16  Nicholson    1914

Values for the smaller moons are approximate. Many more small moons are not listed here.

Jupiter's Rings

          Distance   Width   Mass
Ring      (km)        (km)   (kg)
----      --------   -----  ------
Halo      100000     22800   ?
Main      122800      6400  1e13
Gossamer  129200    214200   ?

(distance is from Jupiter's center to the ring's inner edge)

The day the moon is gone

If the time of Earth’s existence was condensed into a 24-hour clock, the moon formation event occurred just 10 minutes after the Earth was born. The Earth formed 4.56 billion years ago, and the Moon formed about 30 million years later. At that time, the Earth was a magma ocean. An impactor about the size of Mars struck the Earth at an oblique angle, and removed some of the magmatic mantle. This mantle was put in orbit around the Earth, together with some of the debris from the impactor itself, and this material eventually formed the Moon.

When the Moon first formed, it was very close to the Earth. It was possibly only 20 to 30 thousands of kilometers away, and it would have looked extremely large in the sky, at least 20 to 10 times bigger. But there were no living creatures on the Earth at that time to witness this beautiful scene.

The tidal effect of a body increases as a cube of the distance, so the effect of the Moon’s tidal forcing on the Earth was extremely high at this time, to the point that the early magma ocean was affected. This provided some additional energy to the heating from radioactive elements present, but after the radiogenic heating decayed, the Moon still was a source of heating that may have had some geological effect, keeping the Earth’s magma hot and perhaps forcing additional convection in the Earth’s mantle.

After the Earth started to cool, the first crust started to float on top of the magma. During this period the Earth was subjected to increased meteor bombardment. The bombardment had been very intense at the beginning of the solar system and then had started to decline, but about 500 million years after the birth of the Earth, or about 2 hours and 40 minutes into our clock of 24 hours, there was a burst of impactors. This lasted for about hundred million years, and we call this “the late heavy bombardment.” Many of the large basins on the Moon are evidence of this late heavy bombardment period. In this way, the Moon is a history book for the inner solar system and the Earth. We have studied these basins with the SMART-1 mission.

The Earth was hit more often than the Moon, however, because Earth is larger and has more gravity. This increased gravity also caused the impactors to be accelerated to higher velocities towards the Earth. That must have been a catastrophic time to be here. So many bombardments would have sterilized the planet. If life had appeared before this period, it would have been extinguished unless it found a way to retreat into niches where it could be protected from these global catastrophes.

When some of these impactors hit the Earth, the explosion caused rocks and dirt from Earth to shoot up and away from our planet. Some of that projected material flew all over the solar system, and some of it landed on the Moon. There could be a few hundred kilograms of Earth material per square kilometer of the Moon’s surface, buried under a few meters of lunar soil. It would be interesting to retrieve those rocks and bring back samples of the early Earth. Almost nothing from this time period has survived on the Earth because of tectonic recycling of the crust plates or because of atmospheric weathering. We would try to detect some organics within those rocks, and that could tell us about the history of organic chemistry on Earth. Some of these rocks could even have preserved fossils of life. Such rocks could help us look further back into the fossil record, which now stops at 3.5 billion years ago. This way, we could possibly learn about the emergence of life on Earth.

By exploring the Moon, we also can get clues on how the Earth has evolved. We can study processes on the Moon that have also shaped the Earth, like volcanism and tectonics. Because the Moon is smaller than the Earth, the Moon’s radiogenic heating dissipated much faster. After about one billion years, the interior of the Moon didn’t evolve much, and surface changes mostly were due to impacts. There was a brief period of magmatic activity from the subsurface -- a few plumes of magma made their way up to the surface and filled newly formed impact basins with basalt, creating what we call the Maria. This happened up to about 2 billion years ago. Because the Moon offers different conditions than the Earth, we can better understand how physical processes work generally by studying a larger range of parameters than just the Earth’s.

The Moon affects the liquid envelope of the Earth, and the oceanic tides in particular. The Moon affects the ocean tides more in some areas than others. For instance, in the channel between the British Isles and the European continent, the tidal range can be 10 meters, compared to what you see in the Pacific, where it is below a meter.

The crust of the Earth is also affected. The Moon’s tidal forcing causes significant heating and dissipation of energy to take place. Part of this energy is heating the Earth, and part of it is dissipated by forcing the Moon to recede from the Earth over time. There are people who propose that the tidal effect of the Moon may have helped trigger the convection on the Earth that led to the multi-plate tectonics. The other planets don’t have the same tectonic cycle. For most of them, the crust is like a lid that doesn’t move much horizontally, and the magma and heat are blocked by this lid on the surface. The Earth instead has rolling convective motion that drags the crust, and then the crust plunges back down into the mantle and gets recycled.

There are some very subtle effects of the Moon in the climate and the oceans. One pattern that has been found recently is related to the Pacific Ocean’s El Niño phenomenon. You have a cold undersea current coming from the Antarctic sea, and that creates the Humboldt stream which keeps the sea around the South American coast near Peru and Chile quite cold. Because of this, there are fewer clouds and less precipitation there. Sometimes this current drifts away from the coast, and then you have much more cloud formation and a period of very bad weather over South America. Satellites have monitored this stream over the Pacific Ocean and they have found some streams which were not known before. They can connect some of these streams with how the Moon’s tidal effect influences the mixing of the deep ocean. There was a French-American mission called TOPEX/Poseidon that accurately measured the altitude of the sea and detected a little stream a few centimeters high. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but over the whole area of the Pacific Ocean it represents a huge amount of water transferred from one place to another.

If you would take away the Moon suddenly, it would change the global altitude of the ocean. Right now there is a distortion which is elongated around the equator, so if we didn’t have this effect, suddenly a lot of water would be redistributed toward the polar regions.

The Moon has been a stabilizing factor for the axis of rotation of the Earth. If you look at Mars, for instance, that planet has wobbled quite dramatically on its axis over time due to the gravitational influence of all the other planets in the solar system. Because of this obliquity change, the ice that is now at the poles on Mars would sometimes drift to the equator. But the Earth’s moon has helped stabilize our planet so that its axis of rotation stays in the same direction. For this reason, we had much less climatic change than if the Earth had been alone. And this has changed the way life evolved on Earth, allowing for the emergence of more complex multi-cellular organisms compared to a planet where drastic climatic change would allow only small, robust organisms to survive.

The Moon has influenced biology in other ways as well. For species living near the coast, the tide is an important factor. When you look at the shorelines, you can recognize different layers of organisms that have adapted to the salt water conditions based on the ebb and flow of the tide.

The eyesight of many mammals is sensitive to moonlight. The level of adaptation of night vision would be very different without the Moon. Many of these species have evolved in such a way that their night vision could work in even partial lunar illumination, because that’s when they are most active. But they can be more subjected to predators, too, so there is a balance between your ability to see and your ability not to be seen. The Moon has completely changed evolution in that aspect.

Human vision is so sensitive that we are almost able to work by the light of the Milky Way. The full Moon has more light than we need to see at night. For most of our history, we were hunting and fishing or doing agriculture, and we organized our lives by using the Moon. It determined the time for hunting, or the time where we could harvest. That’s why most of our calendars are based on the Moon.

In a recent workshop called “Earth-Moon Relationships,” psychologists discussed the relation between the lunar phases and several aspects of life. There was a very interesting correlation, not with the birth of children, but with the time of conception. Perhaps that is due to some social or sentimental value of the Moon. We tend to forget the impact the Moon has on our lives because we use electric lights, but for most of our history we had to adapt our behavior to the lunar phases.

Finally, the Moon had a key role in the emergence of science, and in our understanding of our place in the universe. We saw the repetition of the phenomena of lunar phases, and we observed solar and lunar eclipses. These were big challenges to our understanding of nature, and a few astronomers were put to death because they weren’t able to predict the eclipses. This challenged us to develop accurate predictions for the motion of the sun and the motion of the Moon.

Studying the Moon helped us determine distances in the solar system and the size of celestial objects. By studying lunar phases, for example, people were able to determine how far the Moon is from the Earth, the size of the Earth, and our distance from the sun. More recently, the Moon was the terrain where the space race took place between two political systems, allowing for great technical and scientific achievements. The Moon has inspired humankind to learn how to travel to space, and to bring life beyond Earth’s cradle.

NASA Aids in Characterizing Super-Earth Atmosphere

PASADENA, Calif. -- A team of astronomers, including two NASA Sagan Fellows, has made the first characterizations of a super-Earth's atmosphere, by using a ground-based telescope. A super-Earth is a planet up to three times the size of Earth and weighing up to 10 times as much. The findings, reported in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature, are a significant milestone toward eventually being able to probe the atmospheres of Earth-like planets for signs of life.

The team determined the planet, GJ 1214b, is either blanketed with a thin layer of water steam or surrounded by a thick layer of high clouds. If the former, the planet itself would have an icy composition. If the latter, the planet would be rocky or similar to the composition of Neptune, though much smaller.

"This is the first super-Earth known to have an atmosphere," said Jacob Bean, a NASA Sagan Fellow and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "But even with these new measurements, we can't say yet what that atmosphere is made of. This world is being very shy and veiling its true nature from us."

GJ 1214b, first discovered in December 2009, is 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.5 times as massive. Previous observations of the planet's size and mass demonstrated it has a low density for its size, leading astronomers to conclude the planet is some kind of solid body with an atmosphere.

The planet orbits close to its dim star, at a distance of 0.014 astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun, approximately 93 million miles. GJ 1214b circles too close to its star to be habitable by any life forms.

Bean and his team observed infrared light as the planet crossed in front of its star. During such transits, the star's light filters through the atmosphere. Gases absorb the starlight at particular wavelengths, leaving behind chemical fingerprints detectable from Earth. This same type of technique has been used to study the atmospheres of distant "hot Jupiters," or Jupiter-like planets orbiting close to their stars, and found gases like hydrogen, methane and sodium vapor.

In the case of the super-Earth, no chemical fingerprints were detected; however, this doesn't mean there are no chemicals present. Instead, this information ruled out some possibilities for GJ 1214b's atmosphere, and narrowed the scope to either an atmosphere of water steam or high clouds. Astronomers believe it's more likely the atmosphere is too thin around the planet to let enough light filter through and reveal chemical fingerprints.

"A steamy atmosphere would have to be very dense – about one-fifth water vapor by volume -- compared to our Earth, with an atmosphere that's four-fifths nitrogen and one-fifth oxygen with only a touch of water vapor," Bean said. "During the next year, we should have some solid answers about what this planet is truly like."

The team, which included Bean's co-authors -- Eliza Miller-Ricci Kempton, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and Derek Homeier of the Institute for Astrophysics in Gottingen, Germany -- examined GJ 1214b using the ground-based Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile.

"This is an important step forward, narrowing our understanding of the atmosphere of this planet," said NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program Scientist Douglas Hudgins at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Bizarre worlds like this make exoplanet science one of the most compelling areas in astrophysics today."

The Sagan Fellowship Program is administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Its purpose is to advance the scientific and technical goals of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The program is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Double Vision: New Instrument Casts Its Eyes to the Sky

The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer has taken its first images of the star Beta Peg in the constellation Pictor -- an encouraging start for an instrument designed to probe the cosmic neighborhoods where Earth-like planets could exist.

Eight years in development, the NASA-funded instrument combines beams of light from twin 8.4-meter (28-foot) mirrors mounted atop the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz. "By combining the light of the telescopes, we're able to realize its full potential," said Project Manager Tom McMahon of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "Together, the two mirrors form the largest single-mount telescope in the world."

"The quality of the first-light images is wonderful," said the principal investigator for the project, Phil Hinz of the University of Arizona. "The telescope was stable and the instrument was working properly."

With this high-resolution imaging capability, astronomers hope to probe nearby solar systems -- specifically, the areas in these systems where Earth-like planets with liquid water could exist. Though the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer won't be able to detect Earth-size planets, it will be able to see dust disks that are indicative of planet formation, in addition to detecting large, Jupiter-size planets farther out from the star. These findings will help future, space-based exoplanet missions know where to search for Earth-like planets in our own galactic neighborhood.

With its ability to probe this "habitable zone" of other solar systems, the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer will also complement the capabilities of other NASA missions -- the Keck Interferometer, which can find dust very close to stars; and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is adept at observing planet-forming dust that is much more distant.

"This instrument will help complete our picture of what planetary systems look like and be a pathfinder for finding Earth-like planets that are close by," Hinz said.

With a major upgrade of the Large Binocular Telescope's adaptive optics system scheduled for next year, the interferometer will undergo testing and commissioning for the majority of 2011, and during that time, scientific observations will begin.

"This is the highest-resolution instrument of its kind in the world," McMahon said. "We won't just be able to image exoplanets, but extragalactic objects, nebulae and galaxies. It's taken time to make sure it works as envisioned, but now it's time to do science."

The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer is funded by NASA and managed by Ben Parvin at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., as part of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The instrument and product development are provided by the University of Arizona, Tucson.