Kepler’s Exoplanets vs. the Solar System

[n2doc]

By Dave Mosher February 14, 2011


Giving perspective to the search for Earth-like planets, a new data visualization displays more a thousand extrasolar planet candidates as if they were orbiting our sun.

The 1,236 exoplanet candidates shown in the video (above) have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space-based observatory since its March 2009 launch. The latest trove of data was released Feb. 3 in Nature.

Jer Thorp, a data-artist-in-residence at New York University, said Kepler’s surprising number of discoveries inspired him to build the visualization in two afternoons with the programming language Processing.

“I sent out a tweet asking if anybody had the data, and somebody sent me the paper,” Thorp wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It seemed like a really fun data set to visualize, and I also figured it would help me to understand a bit more about the science behind the Kepler project.”

cool video at link

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/kepler-extrasolar-planets/