Thousands of Exoplanets Orbiting a Single Star

By Bora Zivkovic | January 16, 2013 | 1

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Video of the Week #76, January 16th, 2013:

Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

From: Beautiful Video Imagines the Thousands of Known Exoplanets Orbiting a Single Star by Michael Moyer at Observations.

Source: Alex Parker/Kepler/NASA

This beautiful animation requires a bit of an introduction. It shows 2299 transiting planet candidates found by NASA’s Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, red indicates warmest, and blue / indigo indicates coldest candidates. Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!

About the Author: Bora Zivkovic is the Blog Editor at Scientific American, chronobiologist, biology teacher, organizer of ScienceOnline conferences and editor of Open Laboratory anthologies of best science writing on the Web. Follow on Twitter @boraz.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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1 Comment

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1. ThinkUniverse 4:46 am 01/23/2013

It would have been nice to add some more information for comparison.
For instance where would you place the habitable zone?
Some information about the shown planets would be nice too.
Link to this

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