Thank you to everyone that’s been patiently watching me work through this on Patreon. When I sketched this out some months ago, I had no idea how many things would happen in my life while making it- moving to a new house, my grandmother being put in the hospital, the headquarters of my workplace being hit with a massive tornado, and a whole ass convention in the middle of it.
Some months ago, I had a dream about a woman in a space suit and the space suit was full of stargazer lilies. The image stuck with me and I played around with the idea of it until I was ready to make it. It started this sort of narrative about a space druid, escaping from a crowded planet.
The lilies were a considerable challenge for this one- the petals are a generally flat object that bends and that kind of form can be difficult to portray in a 2D piece. But it came down to just working at it and working at it until the space made sense- even when the computer shuts down without warning.
I WENT AND LOOKED INTO THIS AND DEADASS PLANET NINE HAS BEEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE SINCE 2016 AND WE HAVE ESTIMATES ABOUT WHERE IT IS BUT WE HAVE NO. CLUE.
IT’S 10 TIMES LARGER THAN EARTH.
WE THINK WE FOUND ONE OF PLANET NINE’S MOONS.
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS.
WHAT THE FUCK
*jaws theme*
Bitcg it’s real
Space is big guys. Like really really mindbogglingly big, even if we’re only talking about the space in our solar system.
That tiny green circle labeled “orbit of Neptune”? That circle has a radius of four and a half billion kilometers (2.3 billion miles). It’s 30 times as far away from the sun as the Earth is; light takes 8 minutes to get to Earth, yes? It takes 4 hours for light to get to Neptune. It is ridiculously far away, going by the standards we’re used to on Earth.
And look at how small is it compared to the predicted orbit of Planet Nine. The estimates for the semi-major axis range from 400 to 1000 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.
Notice that the orbit is an ellipse? Statistically, it’s likely that this planet is currently closer to the far end of the ellipse (the aphelion, or to be generic, apoapsis), because orbiting objects move slower at the aphelion so they spend more time there. Pluto orbits the Sun once every 247 years – anything further out is going to take longer still, so we can’t wait around for it to get closer and expect to see anything anytime soon.
There’s also viewing difficulties. The wikipedia article says that if it’s relatively close, it might show up on pictures from stellar databases, but if it’s further away (more likely) it’ll be too faint and require a stronger telescope. Also, in the part of the expected orbit that goes in front of the galactic plane, it would look like any back ground star and be harder to pick out.
That is how you lose a planet. More specifically, that’s how you have trouble finding a planet that you don’t know for sure exists yet, that might be invisible to all but the biggest telescopes, and that’s exact position isn’t exactly known.
has taught us there are so many planets out there, they outnumber even
the stars. Here is a sample of these wondrous, weird and unexpected worlds (and
other spectacular objects in space) that Kepler has spotted with its “eye” opened to the heavens.
Kepler has found that double sunsets
really do exist.
Yes, Star Wars fans, the double sunset on Tatooine could really exist.
Kepler discovered the first known planet around a double-star system, though
Kepler-16b is probably a gas giant without a solid surface.
Kepler has gotten us closer to finding
planets like Earth.
Nope. Kepler hasn’t found Earth 2.0, and that wasn’t the job it set out
to do. But in its survey of hundreds of thousands of stars, Kepler found planets
near in size to Earth orbiting at a distance where liquid water could pool on
the surface. One of them, Kepler-62f, is about 40 percent bigger than Earth and
is likely rocky. Is there life on any of them? We still have a lot more to
learn.
This sizzling world is so hot iron would
melt!
One of Kepler’s early discoveries was the small, scorched world of
With a year that lasts less than an Earth day and density high enough to
imply it’s probably made of iron and rock, this “lava world” gave us the first
solid evidence of a rocky planet outside our solar system.
If it’s not an alien megastructure, what
is this oddly fluctuating star?
When Kepler detected the oddly fluctuating light from
were born 11 billion years ago when our galaxy was in its youth. Imagine
what these ancient planets look like after all that time?
Kepler found a supernova exploding at
breakneck speed.
This premier planet hunter has also been watching stars explode. Kepler
recorded a sped-up version of a supernova called a
“fast-evolving
luminescent transit” that reached its peak brightness at breakneck
speed. It was caused by a star spewing out a dense shell of gas that lit up
when hit with the shockwave from the blast.
