gjlaunch
Fifty-seven light-years from London, a world glows pink.
02 · Virgo
Look to Virgo on a spring night.
Among its stars is one you can only just see without a telescope: 59 Virginis, also known as GJ 504. The light reaching you tonight left it around 1969, the year we first walked on the Moon.
03 · GJ 504
A sun a little warmer than ours.
Far out in its system, nine times further from its star than Jupiter is from ours, a giant planet circles in the cold. By the usual rules of planet-making, it should not be there at all.
04 · GJ 504 b
The colour of dark cherry blossom.
Four times the mass of Jupiter, and still glowing from the heat of its own making. The astronomers who photographed it in 2013 described its colour as a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta
.
05 · Descent
Two hundred and thirty-seven degrees, and no ground below.
There is no surface to land on, only a warm pink haze that deepens as you fall. Somewhere in here, a perfume begins.
06 · Eau de Parfum
signal 504
Our fourth perfume, bottled by hand in our London studio. The first batch will be small.
Join the first voyage- Object
- Northern sky
- Field of view
- 100°
Destination notes
Every perfume of ours begins with a place.
Lunar Dust began with the Moon. Our fourth goes further out, to a young world that astronomers have photographed but no one will ever visit. These are the facts we are building it from.
- Destination
- GJ 504 b, a gas giant
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Host star
- 59 Virginis (GJ 504), a G0 star slightly hotter than the Sun
- Distance
- About 57 light-years
- Orbit
- 43.5 AU from its star (projected), about nine times Jupiter's distance from the Sun
- Temperature
- About 237 °C
- Mass
- About four times Jupiter
- Colour
- A dull, dark magenta
- First imaged
- 2013, Subaru Telescope, Hawaii
The first voyage
Be among the first to smell it.
We will write once when signal 504 lands, with its notes and the launch date. Our list hears before anyone else.
No need to decide anything today. You can leave the list whenever you like.
Planet facts: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Subaru Telescope team, 2013.