Journey to the Exoplanets (for iPad)

Exoplanets?worlds orbiting other stars?are one of the hottest topics in astronomy, as researchers close in on detecting potentially habitable Earth-like planets, ?while also finding exotic worlds such as ?Tatooine?, which orbits a double star. iPad app Journey to the Exoplanets ($9.99) is a multifaceted, immersive introduction to the subject, complete with beautiful artists? renditions of our best guess as to what some of these worlds might look like up close.

Journey to the Exoplanets, a collaboration between Scientific American and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is classified in the iTunes App Store as a book. As an interactive, multimedia eBook, it?s highly impressive, rich in information and with beautiful supportive graphics (and in some cases, audio or video clips). It does well in covering even basic material in a lively, engaging way, and should be enjoyable to a wide-ranging audience, from young students to astronomy buffs, teachers, and scientists. It?s in easy pick as an Editors? Choice as an educational app.

Upon opening the app, the user is at the controls of a starship, with different panels or buttons to access various functions. It's a bit hokey, perhaps, but it's as effective an interface as any. Most of the controls are duplicated in a bar at the top of the screen that contains 10 small buttons with icons?the bar remains in place no matter what section of the app you navigate to. The buttons are labeled Mission Control (the Home button, by another name); What is a Planet?; Exoplanet Timeline; What is A Star; Radiation And Space Travel; Finding Exoplanets; Exoplanet Gallery; Planet Builder; Filtering Starlight; and Little Scientist. A larger tab to the right, Planet Picker, lets you access specific worlds (listed by name) from the Exoplanet Gallery.

Cherry-Picked Worlds

The Exoplanet Gallery is the centerpiece of this app; opening it up brings up 88 thumbnails?16 to a screen?showing beautifully illustrated artists? renditions of alien worlds. (In the cases of Fomalhaut b and Beta Pictoris b, actual images of the star systems are shown.) At the bottom of each illustration in the Exoplanet Gallery is a dial, with the choices Info, Distance, and Discovery. Discovery gives the planet?s discovery year and month, Distance gives the system?s distance in light years, and spinning the dial to Info causes a translucent block of text with a description of the planet to pop up. For many worlds, audio files (and in one case, a video) are accessible, giving additional info. The depictions of these worlds are uniformly beautiful, and at least in part speculative, as we have limited information about many of these systems. The final 5 are largely fanciful depictions of alien life in different habitats.?

Although the vast majority of the 88 graphics in the gallery were smoothly accessible through Planet Picker, maybe 3 of them?one of them being ?Upsilon Andromedae System??would not only fail to open but tapping on their names would crash the app, and I?d have to relaunch it. I had no trouble accessing the graphics in question by clicking on their thumbnails in Exoplanet Gallery.

The Lowdown on the High Up: Planets and Stars

Although some of the topics (for example, What is a Planet? and What is a Star?) may seem basic at a glance, they?re covered in some detail. It wasn?t long ago that astronomers were debating the very question of what constitutes a planet. The section on planets starts with the ?wanderers? known to the ancient Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans through the discovery of asteroids (which were counted as planets until it was clear how small and numerous they are), Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and the eventual demotion of Pluto in 2006 along with the first formal definition of a planet, at least in our solar system. ?

The discovery of exoplanets has revealed new classes of planets; for example, Hot Jupiters (gas giant planets that orbit very close to their stars), Super-Earths (planets more massive than Earth but less so than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune), and Rogue Planets (worlds that wander the galaxy, unbound to any star). The app discusses these as well as hypothetical worlds such as Carbon Planets.?

In addition to going into similar detail about stars, What is a Star? has a subsection called 20 Stars: a 3D representation of the 20 stars nearest the Sun, showing their locations relative to the Sun, to each other, and to the galactic center.

The Exoplanet Timeline encompasses 4,000 years of planet-related discoveries, with nearly a third of the timeline citing events since the first exoplanet discovery two decades ago. The Radiation and Space Travel section describes the danger faced by astronauts from cosmic radiation?the risk greatly compounded in long voyages such as those required to reach even the nearest stars. The section depicts possible shielding methods for spaceships, and includes an audio interview with a quantum physicist, Anton Zeilinger.

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