NASA-EarlyEarth-PaleOrangeDot-20190802.jpg


Summary

Description
English: When haze built up in the atmosphere of Archean Earth, the young planet might have looked like this artist's interpretation - a pale orange dot. A team led by Goddard scientists thinks the haze was self-limiting, cooling the surface by about 36 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Kelvins) – not enough to cause runaway glaciation. The team’s modeling suggests that atmospheric haze might be helpful for identifying earthlike exoplanets that could be habitable.
Date
Source https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/32407459560 ; see also https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/shining-starlight-on-the-search-for-life and https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-team-looks-to-ancient-earth-first-to-study-hazy-exoplanets
Author NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy

Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA . NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted ". (See Template:PD-USGov , NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy .)
Warnings:

Captions

NASA - Early Earth - Pale Orange Dot - August 2, 2019

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

1 February 2017

image/jpeg