What would the sun look like if it retreated under the horizon on a long (17 hour) day on Uranus? Or what will the late night sunset look like on Mars when we finally get there?
Thanks to some computer models at NASA, these scenarios have become a little easier to imagine, and David Nild's "Science Alert" report, published on June 28, examined the results of those models.
"What makes the magical sunset scene is the interaction between sunlight - which includes all the colors of the rainbow - with gases and dust in the atmosphere, and the lower the atmosphere, the less impressive the sunset," Nilde says.
Yellow flower sunset
Thanks to these models, planetary scientist Jeronimo Villanueva - from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt - created a simulation of how sunset appears on the planets of Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Titan (Saturn's moon), and the outer planet "Trappist-1E".
The shows are pretty amazing, Nilde says, as the scene looks as if you've focused your ultra-wide lens camera on the sky.
On Venus, for example, the light yellow to orange, brown, and black color fades as the sun disappears.
Since the planet revolves around its axis very slowly, you will need to wait 116 times longer than you were doing on Earth, which is just over half a year of Venus.
This does not mean that you will necessarily settle to watch the sunset on Venus, with its dense and heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere, intense surface pressure, and average temperatures of 471 ° C.
The task of exploring Uranus
This simulation is not just a fun process just to watch; The team also has a serious scientific point, which is preparations before the possible exploration mission of Uranus.
There is still a lot that we do not know about this gas planet, and any readings of its atmosphere will need to explain the levels of light that reach the spacecraft's sensors.
With data from this simulation on board, the probe will have a better idea of what to look for, and it can better assess the composition of the atmosphere as it absorbs sunlight, such as which wavelengths were scattered, and what causes it.
The Martian sunset
The new models are now part of the planetary spectrum generator, built by Villanueva and her colleagues, which is used to interpret and decode the light that reaches our telescopes to try to understand what the atmosphere looks like in other worlds.
Mars is the only other planet that we have a realistic opportunity to live on, unless we spend all of our time on an incredibly powerful and robust floating spaceship that can withstand extreme temperatures and heat.
The Villanova simulation also shows how the Martian sunset will look to its inhabitants, as the atmosphere creates a mixture of muddy brown and bright yellow colors as the sun disappears beyond the horizon.
In fact, this simulation is only part of the story - as the Kerosite spacecraft has already demonstrated - as the days on Mars could end with a clear blue tinge.
Where dust scatters Mars on the red wavelengths of light out of sight, leaving the blue wavelengths to hit our eyes, if only we could go and see for ourselves.