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About Mark Garlick


   <strong>Aurora Planet</strong> <br />This is the view from a planet in a close orbit around a magnetic flare star. These stars have such gigantic episodes of magnetic activity that they must have huge starspots, some of which have actually been imaged. Life on a nearby planet would be impossible. The atmosphere is almost entirely gone, stripped away. But there is still a residual exosphere, making this an ideal spot to go aurora-spotting — if you have a decent space suit. <strong>3001 Earth Odyssey</strong> <br /> Here I show the Earth in the deep future, when our technology has advanced to the point that we can clearly see it from orbit. Or perhaps it is a different planet elsewhere in the universe, somewhat like the Earth but having a greater technology than ours now. <strong>Beneath Titan's Veil</strong> <br /> Titan is the subject of the Huygens probe, which reached this Saturnian moon on 14 January 2005. In this image, made before the encounter, I assumed a landscape sopping with murky, frigid, liquid hydrocarbon seas, while similar substances rain from the thick air.
   <strong>Binary Asteroid III</strong> <br />This is an impression of the binary asteroid 90 Antiope, which orbits in the main part of the outer asteroid belt. Each asteroid is about 86 km across, orbiting its partner from a distance of 170 km and with a period of 16.5 hours. Binary asteroids are thought quite common, created during collisions. <strong>Blue Mars IV</strong> <br /> Astronomers are uncovering more and more evidence that seems to indicate that the planet Mars, now dry and lifeless, was once able to support liquid water. This impression shows the Red Planet in the future, when humans have terraformed and collonised its surface. There are vast seas, a much thicker atmosphere, and cities gleaming on the planet's night side. The outermost moon, Deimos, is in the foreground. <strong>Blues For A Dead World</strong> <br />Here you have an impression of a high-mass X-ray binary, in which a blue giant (right) orbits a compact object such as a neutron star or black hole. The blue giant has a powerful stellar wind, shown radiating outwards here. Some of this material wraps around the compact object in a shock wave, producing X-rays via accretion.
   <strong>Cataclysm VI</strong> <br />This artwork depicts a binary star system called a cataclysmic variable. The larger star is a red dwarf. It is orbiting a white dwarf (top) whose powerful gravity pulls at the atmosphere of the red dwarfs and slowly strips it off. The material stolen by the hungry white dwarf spreads out to form a so-called accretion disc, which is exceptionally luminous and, in some systems, prone to explosions. I have many more images of cataclysmic binaries <a href="http://www.space-art.co.uk/pages-en/stars-II" target="_blank">here</a>. <strong>Earth Approach</strong> <br />Our serene blue planet looms above the dusty horizon of an Earth-approaching asteroid, its surface cracked and strewn with boulders. The image shows the Earth as it would appear from a dangerously close distance of about 40,000 km, well inside the orbit of the Moon and comparable to those of geostationary satellites. <strong>Europan Night</strong> <br />What you have here is a view of the giant planet Jupiter from a vantage point somewhere above the surface of Europa, one of its icy moons. The Sun is right behind you but just below the moon's horizon, so the light in this rendition is coming from Jupiter. Europa's surface is a cracked layer of ice that looks like a jigsaw puzzle. The ice has been fractured because, probably, there is a sub-Europan ocean of liquid water constantly on the move beneath it.
   <strong>Jovian Flyby</strong> <br />Solar sails are gigantic sheets of highly reflective but wafer-thin material. They intercept photons — particles of light — from the Sun, and the pressure from this pushes the craft through space. This picture depicts a solar sail flying past Jupiter and its moon Europa. <strong>Long Hair</strong> <br /> Though comets themselves are only kilometres across, the gas and dust freed from their icy surfaces can stretch vast distances, blown by the solar wind and by radiation pressure. Here, a bright comet passes behind the Earth as it heads towards the Sun, its tail — longer than the radius of Earth's orbit — dwarfing the puny planet and its satellite. <strong>New Milky Way</strong> <br /> An accurate impression of the Milky Way Galaxy seen from an oblique vantage point. Astronomers think that the Galaxy has a central bar, seen in this image. The arms, as we know them, are in their correct places. Note also the so-called "molecular ring" of dust and young stars that surrounds the bar and nucleus.
   <strong>Our Place In Space</strong> <br />How do we fit in compared to everything in the Universe? This diagram, created for the children's book <em>Insiders: Space</em>, attempts to enlighten you. It shows the Earth's place in the Solar System, then zooms out to show where the Solar System is located in the Milky Way Galaxy. Another zoom out pinpoints the location of the Milky Way in the Local Group galaxy cluster, and then a final one shows how this is just one galaxy cluster among countless others. <strong>Protoplanet</strong> <br />An illustration showing a primitive terrestrial planet, more properly called a protoplanet, in the process of formation. The planet grows as its gravity sucks in more and more rocky debris. The whole process takes hundreds of millions of years. <strong>Quiet Sea</strong> <br />This is an impression of the Huygens probe, which touched down on Titan on 14 January 2005. Saturn is shown nearly full (as it appeared when the probe got there) but with a substantial shadow of the ring system on it cast by the Sun. A bit of artistic licence here, too, for Saturn was in the other hemisphere when Huygens got there!
   <strong>Sister Earth III</strong> <br />Here is an impression of the extrasolar planet Gliese 581c, which resembles the Earth but which is five times its mass. I show the planet with a hypothetical satellite and a system of rings. <strong>Solar Flare</strong> <br />Solar flares are powerful explosions that occur in the atmosphere of the Sun, more specifically in the parts known as the corona and the chromosphere. When they erupt, they heat the Sun's plasma to tens of million of degrees Celsius, in the process accelerating atmospheric particles (electrons, protons and other particles) to speeds approaching that of light. <strong>When Black Holes Collide</strong> <br />American astronomers have captured a pair of supermassive black holes poised to undergo an extreme collision. The black holes lurk at the centre of a cluster of galaxies, Abel 400. At the moment the two black holes in Abel 400 are widely separated, each surrounded by a vast accretion disc of gas and dust. For this picture, though, I imagined the scenario in several billion years, when the holes reside in a single disk and are about to collide.
   <strong>Cygnus X-1</strong> <br /> Cygnus X-1 is a very famous X-ray binary star system. It consists of a giant blue star (top) in orbit around what in all likelihood is a — wait for it — black hole. The black hole steals gas from its giant companion and that gas flows towards the black hole and then around it — to form what astronomers call an accretion disc. There is no bridge of matter between the objects, though, because the blue star is not sufficiently distorted. Instead, the accretion disc is created by material sucked in from the blue giant\'s immense stellar wind. <strong>Lunar Naissance</strong> <br /> Go back in time more than four billion years. The young Earth (bottom) is still surrounded by a ring of debris from which the Moon (top) has recently formed. The debris is the result of the Earth having been hit by a large protoplanet. This is a revised and improved version of an older image. <strong>Black Hole</strong> <br />A black hole is a collapsed star, the remains of a once massive star whose core ran out of nuclear fuel and imploded. All of the star's mass now occupies a single point in spacetime called a singularity. Black holes cannot be seen by definition, because they emit no light. But they can be seen indirectly, as in this image, if they are surrounded by a ring of stellar debris, an accretion disc.
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Space or astronomical art is the kind of imagery for which I am most well known, thanks to my academic background in astronomy — I was a professional astronomer before I embarked on my present career.
   You can see much a more comprehensive and searchable set of space art on my other website, www.space-art.co.uk.

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