Occasionally I have wondered which exoplanets are most loved by astronomers. One way to find the answer is to pit planets against each another and see which one survives… something my podcast exocast does every year in the #ExoCup!

But another way to answer this question is to look at the trends in the published literature – which planets get cited, mentioned and observed most often? But doing that would mean scraping through every single published astronomical paper for the last fourty years for every single one of the 4000+ exoplanets…

So, with the help of ADS, that’s exactly what I did. And here is the result, plotted using bokeh as a function of time vesus combined exoplanet mentions. (Click here, or scroll below, for the full interactive version)

And the most-cited exoplanet? It’s a classic – the first world ever to be seen transiting, and the first to have its atmosphere detected – HD209458b. And, as always just following it, is HD189733b – the second brightest transiting hot Jupiter, and the first planet to have its surface mapped.

There are other interesting battles for the Top-10. For example, which is the best planet around an M-dwarf? GJ1214b and GJ436b (both transiting Neptunes) are locked in a tight battle for third place!

And what is the best directly-imaged planet? After a long timebehind Kappa And b and HR8799, Beta Pic has spent the last 5 years as the king of Imagers. But 51 Eri b and PDS 70b are steeply rising to challenge for its crown…

There’s a cluster of planets apparently referenced pre-1995, but the majority of these are simply errors in my paper-scraping code. For example a paper with the sentence “stirrups and coat” would flag the planet “Ups And c” (41 mentions since 1993).

The legend is interactive, and if you want to best compare the paths of two planets, you can use the legend labels to “mute” all the planets and then select only those you are interested in. Click here for a full-screen version.