[/caption]
Wow. This remarkable visualization shows every Kepler planetary candidate host star with its transiting companion in silhouette. Jason Rowe from the Kepler science team created the image, and the sizes of the stars and transiting companions are properly scaled. For reference, Rowe has included the Sun with a transiting Earth and Jupiter (below the top row on the right by itself.) The largest star is 6.1 times larger that the Sun and the smallest stars are estimated to be only 0.3 times the radius of the Sun. On his Flickr page, Rowe says the colors of the stars represent how the eye would see the star outside of the Earths atmosphere. “Stars have been properly limb darkened and the companions have been offset relative to one another to match the modeled impact parameter. Some stars will even show more than one planet!” he writes.
For more information and high resolution versions of the image, see Jason Rowe’s Flickr page. This image is featured on today’s (March 29, 2011) Astronomy Picture of the Day.
NASA is actively working to return surface samples from Mars in the next few years,…
Black holes seem to provide endless fascination to astronomers. This is at least partly due…
On May 20th, 2024, an iceberg measuring 380 square kilometers (~147 mi2) broke off the…
Four zebrafish are alive and well after nearly a month in space aboard China's Tiangong…
The hunt for new exoplanets continues. On May 23rd, an international collaboration of scientists published…
In just a few short years, NASA hopes to put humans back on the lunar…