April 12, 2011

Visual Catalogue of Kepler's Exoplanet Discoveries

Kepler Transiting Planet Candidates (Saturated Colours)

Jason Rowe has produced this stunning visual summary of every candidate exoplanet host star discovered using the Kepler space telescope.  Each star's transiting planet is shown in silhouette - note that some stars have multiple planets.  The stars have been scaled according to their size, and coloured according to how they would appear when viewed by eye from outside Earth's atmosphere (the colours have been saturated for easy viewing).  The largest star is 6.1 times the size of our Sun, which is shown for reference (with Jupiter) on its own in the second row.