Penn State student renders planet for global audience

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (WTAJ) — At the end of 2023, Penn State researchers worked to discover the new planet LHS 3154, and one student brought it to life with her video skills.

Abby Minnich, a senior at Penn State, took on the task of creating a visual representation of the new planet. She used the rendering software Blender to create it — a task that ended up being pretty time-consuming.

“Each frame took about, like, two hours to render,” Minnich said.

With the clip in question being close to 30 seconds long, the process ate up a lot of time — especially since time was not her ally.

“I had a week,” she said.

It was not much time, but the strict limit spurred her to do her best work. Her piece was viewed not just in Penn State, but internationally. Searching ‘LHS 3154’ on Google will put her renders towards the top of the results. It is a big accomplishment — but she says she did not do it alone.

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“It’s definitely an international collaboration,” Minnich said. “There’s a lot of people here that make it work, and I wouldn’t be here today without them.”

The research done on LHS 3154 can be found on Science’s website.

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