Friday 16 September 2011

fantastic planet

With some 1800 confirmed and strongly suspected extrasolar planets discovered and more coming into focus nearly every day, it really is a revolution like when van Leeuwenhoek first peered into a microscope and a whole, unseen universe of tiny beasties came into sharp resolution. The cache of discoveries is much more than can be committed to memory, like the pantheon of our possibly not-so-unique Solar System, more already than the catalogue of ships that stormed the beaches at Troy and maybe soon the whole of the story-telling tradition of the Iliad. Though most have not been substantiated beyond radar ghosts, astronomers have found some truly bizarre specimens (or relationships) that both rival and parallel imagination and science-fiction.
In addition to a slew of bulked-up terrestrial planets, there has been worlds battered by x-rays, worlds blacker than midnight, ones with two suns like Tatooine, ones gassy and disperse, and possibly orphaned worlds wandering interstellar space with no host star. It is hard to comprehend, minus even the number-count or superlative, extreme examples, that each of these worlds are actually worlds with at minimum a richness of geology with weathered and cultivated landscapes. In anticipation of a new golden age of exploration, clever people have even devised clocks and calendars for the Martian day (Sol) and year. If such detailed and idiosyncratic knowledge can be applied to a world that is by turns tantalizing and rather mundane, it is hard to imagine what's to become of our earthling standards.