Earth  Planets and Moons  Universe  ID: 13518

Earth Climate Models Bring Exoplanet To Life

Released on January 23, 2020
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Music: "Machine Learning" by Jon Cotton and Ben Niblett; "No Wave" by Julien Vignon; "The Missing Star" by Matthew Charles Gilbert Davidson; all from Universal Production Music

Complete transcript available.

In a generic brick building on the northwestern edge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Md., thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out five quadrillion calculations per second. Known collectively as the Discover supercomputer, these machines are tasked with running sophisticated climate models to predict Earth’s future climate.

But now, they’re also sussing out something much farther away: whether any of the more than 4,000 curiously weird planets beyond our solar system — or exoplanets — discovered in the past two decades could have the ingredients necessary to support life.
 

Source Material

Orbital Differences Between Earth and Proxima Centauri b
Proxima Centauri b Climate Model Scenarios
Where is Proxima B?
Earth Versus Proxima Centauri b Rotation Rates

Credits

LK Ward (USRA): Lead Producer
Claire Andreoli (NASA/GSFC): Lead Public Affairs Officer
Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Lead Writer
Alex Kekesi (Global Science and Technology, Inc.): Lead Visualizer
Anthony DelGenio (NASA/GSFC GISS): Lead Scientist
Michael J. Way (NASA/GSFC GISS): Scientist
Avi Mandell (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist
Chris Smith (USRA): Animator
Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET Systems, Inc.): Technical Support
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13518

This item is part of this series:
Narrated Movies

Keywords:
SVS >> Climate
SVS >> Astrophysics
NASA Science >> Earth
NASA Science >> Planets and Moons
NASA Science >> Universe