Beautiful and inspiring.
“Watch all the exoplanets that we know of orbit their stars simultaneously”
/ my kinda headline: “Mill Strike Looms!”
if I understand it correctly the animation shows only planets found in Kepler’s data
eta, after watching the video: this is beautiful
it was beautiful, i agree. it reminded me of something i’d see in a petri dish, it has an almost biological microscopic feel to it.
Hate to be a downer, but there are an INFINITE number of exoplanets, let that roll around in all your little pea brains for a while.
(Can never understand that infinity thing, it justs keeps on going)
I don’t think it does. I think things are just bogglingly huge, but not infinite. Did I get that wrong?
Germs!
This animation actually answered a question I’ve had in muh leetle brain for a long time. Since Kepler is finding planets by detecting a star dimming when something passes in front of it, how would it know about, say, a planet like Neptune that orbits once every 165 years? Answer: It doesn’t. Look how close all of those planets are to their star! Tiny orbits.
Now I’m wondering if Kepler has a list of dimmings that it’s waiting 165 years to confirm.
Now I’m wondering if there are planets orbiting a star perpendicularly, and kepler would never detect it.
Now I’m wondering if I can build a rocket ship.
Right, as far as I know Kepler won’t detect
- any planets whose orbital plane doesn’t pass in front of the star as viewed from Earth,
- any planets too small to noticeably dim the starlight reaching us,
- almost any planets with very long periods
- almost any planets sufficiently far away from their star so as to subtend a very small angle with respect to it, or
- transparent planets. (What, it could happen.)
Maybe.
Sure, it’s easy. First, you found PayPal…
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