Friday, April 19, 2013

Exoplanet info-graphic from the NYT

I've been busy, but as I have a free moment I thought I should link to this info-graphic created by the NYT showing all the exoplanet systems discovered user Kepler so far.

When sorted by size our Solar System (just the inner three planets) is at the bottom of the page, which goes to show you how strongly weighted Kepler's method is toward detecting exoplanets with small orbital radii.

This bias toward smaller orbital radii true of the majority of current exoplanet discovery methods, but not to the same degree. Exoplanets.org has a nice interactive plotting tool, which I used to plot all discovered exoplanets (not just Kepler) as a function of orbital radius (x-axis),  planet mass with respect to Jupiter (the Earth is 0.00315 times the mass of Jupiter) and host star mass (the size of the symbol).

Exoplanet mass versus oribital radius
Exoplanet mass versus orbital radius