Meet Kepler's Entire Exoplanet Family : Big Pic
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March 29, 2011 -- This spectacular visualization shows each of the Kepler stars with tiny silhouettes representing exoplanetary candidates. All of the stars have been correctly scaled by size. Each star has also been colored (by Jason Rowe, a member of the Kepler science team) to appear as our eye would see them if we were viewing from a location outside of the Earth's atmosphere (the saturation of the image has been enhanced for ease of viewing).
Many of the stars have more than one exoplanet, indicating a star system of worlds.
WIDE ANGLE: The Age of the Exoplanet
As a reference, our sun is also plotted in the diagram with our solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, silhouetted -- it's the lone star just under the first row of large stars. The largest Kepler star (in the top-left hand corner) is over 6 times the size of our sun, whereas the smallest star (in the bottom-right hand corner) is only 0.3 times the radius of the sun.
NASA's Kepler telescope has been diligently cataloging exoplanetary candidates since 2009 and has spotted 1,235 candidate worlds orbiting other stars. These worlds are currently "candidates" as their transit signal (the slight dimming of starlight as the exoplanet passes between its parent star and the space telescope) needs to be further analyzed to confirm the exoplanets' orbit.
For more information and high resolution versions of the above image, see Jason Rowe's photostream on Flickr. This image also features as the March 29 NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.
-- by Ian O'Neill
Image credit: Jason Rowe/Kepler Mission/NASA
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