Published in Chemistry World, 1 Dec 2009
We will surely never solve all the mysteries of the universe. But, as Jon Cartwright reports, spectroscopy holds the key to unravelling many planetary secrets
Stars, planets and other gems in the night sky for so long seemed, both literally and metaphorically, worlds apart. Even the great 19th century French philosopher Auguste Comte, for all his novel perspectives on science, wrote that the internal make-up of ‘heavenly bodies’ would be ‘forever excluded from our recognition’. How wrong he was.
Today, there is no question of unravelling the make-up of objects in space. We know that elements found on Earth, namely hydrogen and helium, are also found on our sun. We know that the sun itself is just one of many trillions of stars, of which some are bigger, hotter, and contain heavier elements. We know the basic composition of planets in our solar system and that similar planets exist in systems throughout the galaxy. We even know a little about how these structures came to be, their dynamics, and how they are evolving in space and time. […]
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