About a year ago, Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler spacecraft science team put together a terrific orrery-type visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011. With a new round of exoplanets just announced, here’s part two. This one is a visualization of the planetary systems discovered by Kepler that have more than one transiting object. There are 885 planet candidates in 361 systems, doubling the number of systems in the original Kepler Orrery. In the description of this video, Fabrycky says the orbits are to scale with respect to each other, and planets are to scale with respect to each other. The colors are in order of semi-major axis, and two-planet systems (242 in all) have a yellow outer planet; 3-planet (85) green, 4-planet (25) light blue, 5-planet (8) dark blue, 6-planet (1, Kepler-11) purple.
Watch and enjoy!
And as a reminder, we’ll be doing a live interview on Friday, March 2 to talk about the latest exoplanet discoveries by Kepler!
How would the earth orbit look in this diagram?
Has anyone other than the Kepler team ever heard of an “orrery”? Most astronomers have never even heard the term, because people stopped making them hundreds of years ago.
Build your own orrery at http://whitedwarf.org/palebluedot/planets.html
Watched and enjoyed!
Thanks, I’m feeling all orrery now.
Please, please, specially when talking about science which should be about open things, please do use the IFRAME code for youtube so it can enable toe HTML5 player for those who do not have a Flash plugin (yes, there are!)
Flash is not interoperable, not accessible, not open, it’s the opposite of the Web.
It’s as easy as changing your
EMBED src=http://www.youtube.com/v/wj2vv6nVlM0?…
to
IFRAME src=http://www.youtube.com/embed/wj2vv6nVlM0
Not everyone can see HTML5