LONG BEACH, Calif.—Yesterday I wrote about the excitement at the
American Astronomical Meeting here about new exoplanet
discoveries. Scientists working on the Kepler satellite
announced the discovery of an additional 461 planet candidates,
bringing the total to 2,740. What are these planets like? Alex
Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has created this
amazing video that imagines all the planets from last year’s
data set orbiting a single star: Here’s Parker describing what’s
in the video (note: r* = the radius of Earth): They are drawn to
scale with accurate radii (in r / r* ), orbital periods, and
orbital distances (in d / r*). They range in size from 1/3 to 84
times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of
equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to
-110 C at the coldest – red indicates warmest, and blue / indigo
indicates coldest candidates. The full HD video is available for
download on Kepler’s main We