The Giant Pink Lady Is Going To Beat The Boy On The Floor With The Fat Puffy Thing While The Clear Pointy-nosed

How you look at color is about to get all messed up…

A while back, I asked you to describe what color the moon appears to your eye. I got some pretty varied and entertaining answers, but you overwhelmingly agreed: The moon is essentially white or bright silver.

Well, you’re wrong.

The moon’s not white at all. It’s actually closer in color to an asphalt road, as we can clearly see in this 100% actually real series of images taken of the moon transiting Earth, courtesy of NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite: 

That whole “the moon is white” thing? It’s just a nasty trick played on your brain by … well, another part of your brain. It has to do with the fact that our eyes perceive illumination in a scene relatively, not absolutely. It’s also why this GIF breaks your brain a little:

Watch this week’s It’s Okay To Be Smart video above to find out more!

Bonus: The PBS Digital Studios Science Squad™ brings you a double whammy of perceptual illusions this week! White isn’t the only light that messes with your visual system, not by a long shot. Did you know that red + green can look like… yellow?

Check out the video below from The Physics Girl and let Dianna teach you why, when it comes to colors, you should never quite believe your eyes:

NASA just released thousands of high-res Apollo mission photos

The space research agency’s Project Apollo Archive made a massive update to its Flickr account Sunday, adding a trove of more than 8,000 photos taken during Moon missions from 1969 to 1972.

Rocket engine exhaust often contains a distinctive pattern known as shock diamonds or Mach diamonds. These are a series of shock waves and expansion fans that increase and decrease, respectively, the supersonic exhaust gases’ pressure until it equalizes with atmospheric pressure. The bright glowing spots visible to the naked eye are caused by excess fuel in the exhaust igniting. As awesome as shock diamonds look, they’re actually an indication of inefficiencies in the rocket: first, because the exhaust is over- or underexpanded, and second, because combustion inside the engine is incomplete. Both factors reduce a rocket engine’s efficiency (and both are, to some extent, inescapable). (Photo credit: XCOR)

This is what our night sky could look like guys.

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NASA’s Fleet of Planet-hunters and World-explorers

Around every star is at least one planet, so we’re bound to find one that is rocky, like Earth, and possibly suitable for life. While we’re not quite to the point where we can zoom up and take clear snapshots of the thousands of distant worlds we’ve found outside our solar system, there are ways we can figure out what exoplanets light years away are made of, and if they have signs of basic building blocks for life. Here are a few current and upcoming missions helping us explore new worlds:

Kepler

Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope searched for planets by looking for telltale dips in a star’s brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. It has confirmed more than 1,000 planets; of these, fewer than 20 are Earth-size (therefore possibly rocky) and in the habitable zone – the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. Astronomers using Kepler data found the first Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star.

In May 2013, a second pointing wheel on the spacecraft broke, making it not stable enough to continue its original mission. But clever engineers and scientists got to work, and in May 2014, Kepler took on a new job as the K2 mission. K2 continues the search for other worlds but has introduced new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

Revving up for launch around 2017-2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find new planets the same way Kepler does, but right in the stellar backyard of our solar system while covering 400 times the sky area. It plans to monitor 200,000 bright, nearby stars for planets, with a focus on finding Earth and Super-Earth-sized planets. 

Once we’ve narrowed down the best targets for follow-up, astronomers can figure out what these planets are made of, and what’s in the atmosphere. One of the ways to look into the atmosphere is through spectroscopy.  

As a planet passes between us and its star, a small amount of starlight is absorbed by the gas in the planet’s atmosphere. This leaves telltale chemical “fingerprints” in the star’s light that astronomers can use to discover the chemical composition of the atmosphere, such as methane, carbon dioxide, or water vapor. 

James Webb Space Telescope

Launching in 2018, NASA’s most powerful telescope to date, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will not only be able to search for planets orbiting distant stars, its near-infrared multi-object spectrograph will split infrared light into its different colors- spectrum- providing scientists with information about an physical properties about an exoplanet’s atmosphere, including temperature, mass, and chemical composition. 

Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope is better than ever after 25 years of science, and has found evidence for atmospheres bleeding off exoplanets very close to their stars, and even provided thermal maps of exoplanet atmospheres. Hubble holds the record for finding the farthest exoplanets discovered to date, located 26,000 light-years away in the hub of our Milky Way galaxy.

Chandra X-ray Observatory

Chandra X-ray Observatory can detect exoplanets passing in front of their parent stars. X-ray observations can also help give clues on an exoplanet’s atmosphere and magnetic fields. It has observed an exoplanet that made its star act much older than it actually is. 

Spitzer Space Telescope

Spitzer Space Telescope has been unveiling hidden cosmic objects with its dust-piercing infrared vision for more than 12 years. It helped pioneer the study of atmospheres and weather on large, gaseous exoplanets. Spitzer can help narrow down the sizes of exoplanets, and recently confirmed the closest known rocky planet to Earth.

SOFIA

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airplane mounted with an infrared telescope that can fly above more than 99 percent of Earth’s atmospheric water vapor. Unlike most space observatories, SOFIA can be routinely upgraded and repaired. It can look at planetary-forming systems and has recently observed its first exoplanet transit. 

What’s Coming Next?

Analyzing the chemical makeup of Earth-sized, rocky planets with thin atmospheres is a big challenge, since smaller planets are incredibly faint compared to their stars. One solution is to block the light of the planets’ glaring stars so that we can directly see the reflected light of the planets. Telescope instruments called coronagraphs use masks to block the starlight while letting the planet’s light pass through. Another possible tool is a large, flower-shaped structure known as the starshade. This structure would fly in tandem with a space telescope to block the light of a star before it enters the telescope. 

All images (except SOFIA) are artist illustrations.

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Tadashi, Hiro, and Aunt Cass

Jupiter and Earth imaged together by NASA’s STEREO/HI-1A / via