New Visualization Shows Incredible Variety of Extraterrestrial Worlds

By Nancy Atkinson - November 03, 2015 11:10 AM UTC | Exoplanets

Here's a great new poster showing over 500 extrasolar planets (about one quarter of the total) that have been discovered since 1988. This visualization, created by graphic artist and writer

Martin Vargic

from Slovakia, is based on the estimated radius and temperature of the planets, however other factors, such as density, age or stellar metallicity were also taken into consideration. All the various known classes of exoplanets are shown on the graphic, such as super-Earths, hot Jupiters, hot Neptunes, water worlds, gas dwarfs or superdense diamond planets.

Click on the image for a larger version, or

a gigantic version here.

I love seeing the variety in sizes, as well as the diversity of projected colors of all the alien worlds.

According to

NASA's Exoplanet Archive website,

1,903 extra solar have been discovered since 1988 as of October 22, 2015.

You may have already seen Vargic's very cool

Map of the Internet

, and of special interest to UT readers a

map of how the the constellations have changed over time

and visualization of the

Moon replaced with other bodies

, as well as a wide variety of other maps and infographics. You can check out his work on his website,

Halcyon Maps

. He puts out new graphics each week.

There are lots of ways to plot exoplanets. On the

Exoplanet Archive website

, you can see plots for exoplanet mass vs. period, temperature, number of exoplanets discovered by year (2014 was a banner year), as well as how the planets were discovered (radial velocity, microlensing, timing variations and orbital brightness modulation).

Previously, we've featured other exoplanet visualizations, such as one of

Kepler's transiting exoplanets

and

exoplanet candidates

, plus this cool video visualization of the planetary systems discovered by Kepler that have more than one transiting object, created by Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler spacecraft science team:

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com