Ok, so if you’re like me, you probably didn’t pay much attention to the latest announcement of the number of exoplanets that had been found by Kepler. It seems like those kinds of announcements have become old hat.
This reaction must have been common, and must have annoyed someone at NASA, so they created this animated gif to get the point across. I have to say it worked on me.
via Kepler’s Latest Exoplanet Hoard, Graphed.
SelfAwarePatterns 
Wow Mike; I love the graphic! Very cool.
~ Eric
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Thanks, but I’m just putting something up that someone at Nasa put together. I agree that it is cool.
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A put down, via a graph. Truly the future is now!
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🙂
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Brilliant!
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I still remember the discovery of the first exoplanet!
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I’m glad to hear that they’re finding interesting stuff in the Kepler data, although I agree that there’s not a lot in there that’s strictly speaking “new”. Lots more planets, mostly in super-heated close orbits around their parent stars. A fairly large percentage in multi-planetary systems, which is interesting (I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the “single planet” systems had outer planets that we simply can’t find with existing telescopes). Four planets that sit in the habitable zones around their stars, but which are probably too big to be rocky worlds – they’re likely either mini-gas giants or planets with a dense layer of atmosphere and liquid (like Kepler-22b).
I’m not sure Kepler can find the Earth-like planet they’re looking for. This article points out that Kepler and most of the existing telescopes on the horizon probably don’t have the ability to detect the effects of an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit around a Sun-like star.
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Thanks for the link! It seems like the stakes for the JWST keep getting larger. I hope it delivers.
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Same here. JWST should be able to do some interesting exo-planet stuff around nearby stars, which are realistically the only ones we might be able to do spectrographic analysis on anyways in the near future.
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