Recently while reading Popular Science, I came across an article that named ten scientist and engineers that the editors felt to be the cream of the crop. Interestingly enough one of the ten was a scientist named Heather Knutson who’s current research involves predicting the weather, temperature and atmosphere on exoplanets. Knutson, who works at Cal Tech, measures the brightness of planet in the infra-red spectrum and then uses this data to infer about the planet’s atmosphere and weather patterns. For example a planet with brighter IR emissions means a hotter atmosphere, while cooler temps are shown by dimmer IR light. Then a temperature map can be created, which can be used to determine weather patterns. Basically if a planet’s temperature map is uniform through out it points to strong winds. A dotted or mixed temp map would point to less sever weather. Currently most of her work is focused on gas giants, but she hopes to begin using the same technique to study rocky, cooler planets that could hold liquid water.

Temperature Profile of an Exoplanet

(Image credit: H. Knutson, NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This research could be useful in many different ways. Related to what we’ve been talking about in class it can help to narrow our search for habitable or life-sustaining planets in the universe. It’s amazing that we can tell so much about planets so distant from us only using infra-red light. Hopefully Knutson’s research also leads to many interesting discoveries about the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system. No matter what she is definitely doing some pretty cool work.