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" Want to know what television series is airing on a planet 39 light years away right now? Or maybe you want to be notified\u00A0every time that\u00A0planet\u00A0zips around its star in a few days, completing\u00A0a &amp;quot;year?&amp;quot; Or maybe, just maybe, you&amp;#039;re dying to know what the inhabitants of a faraway planet\u00A0see\u00A0if they were to look\u00A0on Earth with an improbably big telescope.\u00A0 Brett Morris, a grad student at the University of Washington, has the answers to that. It&amp;#039;s all on one of his three Twitter accounts. There&amp;#039;s\u00A0@PlanetTVGuide, which could tell you that on Wednesday, the signal from the\u00A0first episode of\u00A0Sesame Street\u00A0finally reached Gamma Cephei Ab, the would-be first planet discovered. There&amp;#039;s\u00A0@FarAwayPlanets, a history timeline putting into perspective just how far away these planets are. For example,\u00A0if anyone at HD 128311b\u00A0is looking at Earth,\u00A0they just saw light from the outset of the Vietnam War. And then there&amp;#039;s\u00A0@TransitingNow, a Twitter bot that tells you when a planet is passing in front of its star. That one is now\u00A0working with so much data that\u00A0Morris says he can&amp;#039;t keep up with it\u2014and he\u00A0unfollowed his own creation.\u00A0 &amp;quot;I want these projects to give people an appreciation for the great abundance of planets that have been discovered over the last two decades through @transitingnow, and for the vastness of our galaxy through @farawayplanets and @planettvguide,&amp;quot; Morris said in an email. &amp;quot;Using the distance backwards in time to television shows and historical events on Earth makes surprisingly fun milestones when translated to distances across space.&amp;quot; The catalog of planets comes from\u00A0exoplanets.org, with Morris posting the source code to @transitingplanets to GitHub. It&amp;#039;s all based on stellar distance. A light year measures the distance light travels in a vacuum. Thus, a light-beam or radio wave from Earth takes 4.3 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. It&amp;#039;s an interesting way to put a few things in perspective. One is that a lot of the planets we know of have very\u00A0short years, just a fraction of Mercury&amp;#039;s 88-day orbit. For @PlanetTVGuide, it&amp;#039;s that TV is, cosmically speaking, a shockingly new medium.\u00A0Broadcast television has been around for less than 100 years, and very few planets will have &amp;quot;heard&amp;quot; us in that time.\u00A0For example, for a planet 1,400 light years away, like the shockingly-Earthlike\u00A0Kepler 452b, no radio signals from Earth have reached it. That&amp;#039;s because\u00A0in 615 A.D., there weren&amp;#039;t any radios around. Morris, whose research involves characterizing exoplanet atmospheres, sees these Twitter bots\u00A0as a way to make exoplanet\u00A0data more tangible for everyone. It&amp;#039;s also provided him with some perspective of his own.\u00A0 &amp;quot;I particularly like seeing tweets detailing the arrival of light from historical events that occurred near the time of my birth at exoplanets,&amp;quot;\u00A0he says.\u00A0&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s inspiring to think of the volume in the expanding sphere of light that I&amp;#039;ve interacted with as it blooms, presently 24 light years across, through the galaxy.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a18174/exoplanet-twitter-transits/>