Kepler’s Latest Exoplanet Hoard, Graphed

Zeitgeist 1 Minute

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.

kepler_exoplanets_2014

via Kepler’s Latest Exoplanet Hoard, Graphed.

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9 thoughts on “Kepler’s Latest Exoplanet Hoard, Graphed”

  5. It seems like those kinds of announcements have become old hat.

    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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      1. 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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