2022 was a productive period here at Loch Ness Productions. Our business continued its rebound from the pandemic shutdowns. We were particularly pleased to note the return of users for our popular FULLDOME OnDemand streaming service.
Here in our production studios, we were able to update some computer systems and projection equipment. As a result, our PixelDome will shortly become a nice 4K theater.
Loch Ness Productions was honored to be given the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award late last year by Dome Fest West, one of the dome community’s premier fulldome and immersive festivals.
In citing our many years of work, DFW executive director Ryan Moore noted our pioneering status in planetarium and fulldome content. “The award is long-deserved. Mark and Carolyn Collins Petersen have been at the forefront of fulldome for more than four decades, and their contributions have had a lasting impact on the field,” he said. “We are honored to give them this award and to recognize their lifetime achievement.”
Our CEO, Carolyn Collins Petersen, attended as one of the judges for the festival. She and her cohorts on the judging team were tasked with watching more than a hundred fulldome and immersive pieces of content and deciding on the best of the show.
The Lifetime Achievement citation came at the end of the Awards Gala, and was a marvelous surprise and capstone to a wonderful event.
In the last blog entry, I shared an introduction to exoplanets and the search for these distant worlds. The first possible evidence for an exoplanet lies in data collected at the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1917. It’s a spectrum of material orbiting van Maanan’s star (van Maanen 2). This is a solitary white dwarf about 14 light-years away from Earth. That data suggested the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the star. Unfortunately, no such companion has been found in the intervening years. But, the idea was certainly on the minds of astronomers as far back as the early 20th century and they had the means to begin the search.
A hypothetical vision of what a planet around a pulsar might look like. Courtesy NASA.
The actual detection and confirmation of distant worlds around other stars had to wait until much later in the 20th Century. One of the most intriguing exoplanet discoveries was among the earliest detections made. It is a multi-planet system, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. The grouping lies about 2,300 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo. Astronomers Dale Frail and Aleksander Wolszczan found this system using radio telescopes. They were actually measuring pulsation period of the rapidly rotating neutron star at the heart of the system. It was a rather startling discovery. That’s because, at that time, most astronomers thought there was no way a pulsar could have planets.
What about those Pulsar Planets?
In doing the research for our new show, EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds, I had a chance to dig more deeply into the story of these worlds. They managed to survive the explosion of the supernova event that created the pulsar. Now, it’s not considered too likely they would be habitable worlds—since they are scorched by the pulsar’s radiation. But, one of them, PSR B1257 +112 b is a terrestrial-type world. That is, it’s a rocky world with a mass of 0.02 Earth masses. It orbits the pulsar once every 25.3 days. According to NASA’s Exoplanets site, the three worlds around this pulsar have been nicknamed Poltergeist, Phobetor, and Draugr. Those are ghostly characters from literature (including Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Norse legends). This theme fits, since the worlds around the pulsar would be dead, ghost planets.
It’s intriguing to imagine what they might be like, so we “visited” one in our show. After all, as every planetarian knows, audience members have heard of pulsars. So, what better tale to tell than about pulsar planets?
Living with a Pulsar
Conditions around a pulsar are intense. Remember that a pulsar has a tremendously strong magnetic influence on its nearby environment. That’s because a neutron star emitting the pulsar signal has a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth’s field. That creates an incredibly strong radiation environment. In addition, strong magnetic fields generate powerful electrical fields, which have extremely high electrical potentials. The electrical potential contained in just one square meter of space around the Crab Nebula pulsar contains more energy than we’ve ever generated here on Earth.
One possible vision of what the surface of a world orbiting a pulsar might look like, from the show EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds.
Future Tourist Traps? Probably Not
So, imagine you’re on a planet that lies within that massive magnetic field or—even worse—it’s in the radiation “beamline”. You’d be standing in a very lethal environment. It’s highly doubtful there’d be any surface water on the planet or much of anything else. In other words, it would very likely be a scorched cinder; not a very safe place to be.
Such a place might be good for a very short visit by explorers someday. Maybe they’ll be searching for artifacts from civilizations that may have inhabited the world in the distant past. Those aren’t the prime motivators in the search for exoplanets—life is. But, it’s interesting to think about what those pulsar planets were like before their parent star went through a metamorphosis of its own.
Part One: Delving into Exoplanet Science and Searches
It’s hard to believe more than a quarter-century has passed since the first confirmations of exoplanets around distant stars. The actual detections of these distant worlds actually began much earlier in the 20th Century. I’ve seen references to one made as early as 1917, but it never confirmed as a planet. The technology for confirming detections of distant worlds really began to mature in the 1990s, and the methods astronomers use to do this important work continue to improve.
These days, we know of thousands of worlds orbiting other stars, and more are found through both space- and ground-based observations all the time. That story of exploration is the basis for our latest show, EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds. This article, and several others that follow over the next few weeks, will delve a bit more deeply into the complex of science topics that are part of the search for these distant worlds.
A scene showing the Transiting Exoplanet Explorer Satellite (TESS), created in Digistar for EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds.
I became fascinated with the topic of exoplanets in graduate school (the 1990s). This was about the time the first confirmations of planets around a pulsar reverberated throughout the astronomy community. Of course, as an avid science fiction reader, I’ve read for years about alien worlds. They are a staple of the genre. So, it was just a matter of time before astronomers could find them in real life.
An Exoplanets Numbers Game
Today, nearly five thousand distant worlds have been confirmed as exoplanets (and thousands more candidates are detected). Based on current confirmations, astronomers estimate the Milky Way Galaxy has billions of planets.
Given those kinds of numbers, I knew I had to tell this story. To begin with, it’s a tale of technology giving planetary scientists and astrobiologists unprecedented technological access to distant worlds. While they haven’t yet directly imaged the surface of a world around another star, astronomers learned enough to characterize those distant places. Sometime in the not-too-distant figure, images will come.
Worlds of Many Types
Within the group of confirmed extrasolar planets, astronomers now can separate them into categories—such as gas giants, Neptunians, super-Earths, and terrestrials. Gas giants are similar to our Jupiter or Saturn. The Neptunians are, well, like Neptune, but often larger.
Super-Earths and terrestrials are more like Earth, in various ways. They are where astronomers can search first for habitable environments. That’s important because, in many ways, the hunt for exoplanets IS a search for places where life might exist elsewhere in the universe. And, what better place to start than at a planet that’s similar in ways to the one we already live on?
Visiting Alien Worlds in Our Imaginations
In EXOPLANETS, we talk about search methods and planetary types, and through the “magic” of CGI visualizations, we can visit worlds to see what we think they might be like. Imagine visiting the first worlds discovered to orbit a pulsar—the rapidly spinning remnant of a massive star. Or think about what an ocean planet inside a star’s habitable zone might be like, or a volcanic world still molten from the heat of its formation. Finally, consider what it will be like when we do find a planet that harbors a technological civilization. That’s the stuff of science fiction for now, but if “they” are out there, chances are good our searchers will eventually find them.
We show those imaginary (but possibly real) worlds in EXOPLANETS. I was fortunate to have an extensive set of CGI-generated planets to illustrate this show. We also edited or created scenes using tools at hand such as Evans & Sutherland’s Digistar 6 program. (We have been very proud to use this software and really appreciate the work that the folks at E&S put into their product.) During production, we were also fortunate to have technical assistance and advice from fellow Digistar user Justin Bartel, of the Science Museum of Virginia.
The result is an immersive fulldome video that blends science, documentary-style storytelling, and a touch of science fiction into a compelling look at our search for planets around alien worlds.
We invite our planetarium colleagues to make EXOPLANETS – Discovering New Worlds an integral part of their fulldome repertoire. It’s an approachable, accurate, imaginative—and affordable—story of exploration beyond our solar system for worlds beyond.
2022 was a productive period here at Loch Ness Productions. Our business continued its rebound from the pandemic shutdowns. We were particularly pleased to note the return of users for our popular FULLDOME OnDemand streaming service.
In citing our many years of work, DFW executive director Ryan Moore noted our pioneering status in planetarium and fulldome content. “The award is long-deserved. Mark and Carolyn Collins Petersen have been at the forefront of fulldome for more than four decades, and their contributions have had a lasting impact on the field,” he said. “We are honored to give them this award and to recognize their lifetime achievement.”
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