{"id":1504,"date":"2016-01-20T19:04:29","date_gmt":"2016-01-20T19:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/?p=1504"},"modified":"2020-10-22T22:45:33","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T06:45:33","slug":"is-the-pale-blue-dot-unique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/2016\/01\/20\/is-the-pale-blue-dot-unique\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the pale blue dot unique?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Voyager 1&#8217;s iconic image of the Pale Blue Dot shows hints of Earth&#8217;s uniqueness are visible from great distances; the pale blue color of Earth sets it apart from other objects in our Solar System. But could planet color be used to easily identify Earth-like exoplanets? UWAB graduate students Joshua Krissansen-Totton, Edward Schwieterman, Giada Arney, former VPL grad student Tyler Robinson, postdoc Benjamin Charnay, Professosr Victoria Meadows, and David Catling have <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.org\/10.3847\/0004-637X\/817\/1\/31\">authored a paper<\/a> on whether color can be used to distinguish Earth-like exoplanets from uninhabitable worlds. This paper shows that numerous uninhabitable planets &#8211; particularly icy worlds with thick atmospheres &#8211; could mimic the Earth&#8217;s pale blue color. It is possible to distinguish these icy worlds from Earth-like planets with extremely precise color observations, but this level precision demands a lot of telescope time. This suggests that spectral observations may be preferable to color observations for identifying Earth-like exoplanets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Voyager 1&#8217;s iconic image of the Pale Blue Dot shows hints of Earth&#8217;s uniqueness are visible from great distances; the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[33],"tags":[197,44,100,73,84,188,54],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1505,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1504\/revisions\/1505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/astrobio\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}