Inga Nielsen and a Red dwarf

A Dangerous Sunrise on Gliese 876 d

Gate to Nowhere

© 2012 Inga Nielsen

The amazing digital art by Inga Nielsen shows a flary Red dwarf Gliese 876 in action. The view is from one of the planets labelled Gliese 876 d. For a detailed description of the details shown in this image see NASA APOD.

The nice thing about this extra solar planet is that it is mere 15 light years from us.


The artist
Inga Nielsen (1983) uses TerraGen landscape generator from Terra Dreams for creating the basic landscape and continues working on it on Adobe PhotoShop visually combining facts with imagination.

The results of her skilled work are stunning as we can see from this example. Digital art necessarily involves both facts and imagination. The media is nevertheless highly educational in helping us to visualize the dry facts offered to us by astronomers describing environments that no camera of today can reach.


The planet

Gliese 876 d is an extrasolar planet approximately 15 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius (the Water-bearer). The planet was the third planet discovered orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 876. At the time of its discovery, the planet had the lowest mass of any known extrasolar planet apart from the pulsar planets orbiting PSR B1257+12. Due to this low mass, it can be categorized as a super-Earth.
wikipedia

The star

Gliese 876 is a red dwarf star approximately 15 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. As of 2011, it has been confirmed that four extrasolar planets orbit the star. Two of the middle planets are similar to Jupiter, while the closest planet is thought to be similar to a small Neptune or a large terrestrial planet, and the outer planet has mass similar to Uranus. The orbits of all but the closest planet are locked in a rare three-body Laplace resonance.
wikipedia