Week 2: Trappist-1e Looks Like a Tennis Ball

BASIS fam and all others, welcome back to your favorite, out-of-this-world 🚀 Senior Project blog by yours truly. 

I wanted to start off this week by saying that learning the art of clickbait is incredibly silly. I came up with “Unbelievable! Trappist-1e REVEALED – You Won’t Believe What This Exoplanet Resembles! 🌌🎾 #ExoplanetResearch #TennisBallPlanet,” but ultimately decided against using it as my title 😐.

The amount I’ve been coding the past week, you would never believe me if I told you I dislike coding. But it’s a part of the process, and the results are quite visual (as you’ll see), so all the coding is definitely worth the angst.

As a recap from last week, I coded software to generate a 2D relative humidity map (fancy-pants science terminology for cloud coverage map) of the Earth. Earlier this week, I applied this software to Trappist-1e. Here’s what I got:

As expected, the resolution of the image is not as high as it was for Earth. But it’s still pretty good, and we’ll make do, right guys? 🙂

Here, it’s worth mentioning that there are two types of clouds that are accounted for by this simulation: water clouds and water-ice clouds. Also, it was challenging to figure out the new latitude/longitude parameters, since there are a different number of spectral points than the data we have for Earth. Once I figured that out, this step was smooth sailing ⛵.

One of my final objectives in terms of generating figures is to create a composite image combining simulations without clouds/atmosphere and with clouds/atmosphere for Trappist-1e. For Earth, this looks like the (super cool) following image, which is incredibly realistic and entirely based off atmospheric data for Earth:

For Trappist-1e, the relative humidity 2D map is essential to establish cloud-saturated (middle) simulations. However, the first step to create an accurate cloudy simulation (right) is generating a visual for the planet without an atmosphere and without clouds (left). I have done just that:

Since Trappist-1e is tidally locked, the backside of the planet is not illuminated by its star, so it is dark. The blue is ocean and the white is snow, so we can see that Trappist-1e is a water-world with polar ice caps.

We must also take into account that Trappist-1e orbits a red M-dwarf star, which which has a temperature about half that of our Sun. Incorporating that into our simulation, we see:

…It high-key looks like a tennis ball. The upcoming figures will all be simulated to have blue oceans instead of red oceans, since blue is nicer to look at, and blue oceans are easier to comprehend than red oceans. Let me know if you disagree. 

Next week, I’ll be generating graphs of spectral radiance versus wavelength for this model of Trappist-1e without clouds and without an atmosphere. I’ll also start working to include the atmosphere in the simulations, so you can see the difference between simulations with and without an atmosphere. See you then!

Underwater aliens maybe 👽?

Tanvi Deshmukh