See 2299 Exoplanets in One Video

Finding it difficult to wrap your mind around the immensity of the universe? With thousands of known exoplanet candidates and billions and trillions of stars out there, things can get overwhelming. But a couple of new visualizations of space can help.

The first, produced by Harvard astronomer Alex Parker shows 2299 of the planet candidates found by the Kepler telescope. In truth, those 2299 planets orbit around 1770 stars, but Parker didn?t want to overwhelm his audience with so much on screen. Instead, he animated them all orbiting a single star, to give people an idea of the range of known (potential) exoplanets. Each body is roughly the same size and circles the star at the same distance as it would in reality.

"I wanted to convey the sheer size of the sample in a way that was as visually and viscerally impacting as possible," Parker tells PM. "As part of my research, I had produced a number of simple visualizations of a variety of orbital systems, and knew that a sea of orbiting bodies could be very hypnotic."

Parker coded the visualization himself by building off his earlier animation of the 6 planets in orbit around the star Kepler 11. Originally he was hoping to sonify the transits of every Kepler-discovered planet, but the sheer size of the sample made it impossible to pull any musicality out of the din of orbiting planets. Instead, he settled for the dizzying result created by animating one, impossibly large solar system.

A second video?released last week by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?takes you on a "flight through the Universe" past every one of the nearly 400,000 galaxies scientists have photographic evidence of today.

Incredibly, this video only represents a small part of the Universe extending only 1.3 billion light years from Earth. Some astronomers estimate that the observable universe is home to at least 100 billion galaxies, making 400,000 a drop in the galactic bucket.

More PM coverage of Kepler:

Kepler Will Make Us All Planet Hunters
A Far-Out Solar System That Looks Like Ours
Planetary Odd Couple: Super Earth and Hot Neptune Get Close
Kepler Finds 1235 Planets in Four Months: William Borucki Q&A

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Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/see-2299-exoplanets-in-one-video-11682303?src=rss

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