Similes For Planet Are Out Of This World !!

ROLCAM

Similes For Planet Are Out Of This World .

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken." -- John Keats

Last month's discovery of an Earth-like planet 20 light years away inspired scientists and journalists to create some astonishing similes and analogies. Runaway greenhouses! Buried treasure! Bonfires!

The verbal virtuosity began when a team of European astronomers announced the detection of the planet, which orbits the dim red star Gliese 581. The planet's location in a "sweet spot" seven million miles from a star much cooler than our sun makes it "just right" for supporting life. Inevitably, that unleashed the Goldilocks analogies.

"Until now," wrote Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, "all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the 'Goldilocks problem.' They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous" -- like Poppa Bear himself after eating his porridge, I suppose.

And there be pirates! Said Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, "On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," presumably the one in his first name.

Some descriptions of the movements of stars and planets were decidedly, well ... pedestrian. "We can see if stars are strolling toward us or strolling away from us," said astronomer Steve Vogt. The velocity of Gliese 581, wrote Jeremy Manier of the Chicago Tribune, was "about the speed of a person walking in a park."

Any Glieseans who might actually be walking on the planet would be subject to stronger gravity and thus "stockier" than our life forms, said scientist Frank Drake, conjuring images of a bloated E.T. Viewed from their perspective on the planet's surface, the star Gliese would appear, wrote the Hartford Courant, "large and red in the sky, glowing faintly like a charcoal ember."

But the new planet might also be as overbaked as Venus, where, wrote John Johnson of the Los Angeles Times, "a runaway greenhouse effect [has] created an unlivable hell of a world," which explains, I suppose, why a greenhouse would run away.

But what really got the similes simmering was the difficulty of photographing the new planet against the backdrop of its star. A commentator on NPR compared this to trying to see "a firefly on a lighthouse beacon," while Johnson of the Los Angeles Times likened it to "taking a picture from New York of a person holding a candle in San Diego while standing next to a bonfire."

Wait, but wouldn't the curvature of the Earth...? Oh, never mind.
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Roland Camilleri

Moderator

Sydney , Australia.