300 years of Planetary Discovery in 30 seconds

I have updated my popular exoplanet graphic (which got to 1 million views in 2015) to 2017. And made it far prettier, I’m sure you’ll agree. As before, the x-axis shows orbital period (which can also be thought of as “distance from star”), the y-axis shows planet mass, and the colour shows how the plants were found.

(Click the image for a more high-resolution version, and feel free to use it in any way you see fit.)

 

 

 


And, as a bonus for finding this page (I wont be publicising this anywhere): this is what the future of exoplanet detection (probably) looks like:

This includes estimates of exoplanet hauls from new ground-based detections such as transits, RVs & direct imaging, and the space missions TESS, Gaia, PLATO, WFIRST; all capable of finding tens of thousands of planets.

One thought on “300 years of Planetary Discovery in 30 seconds

  1. Still no pulsar planets, I see.

    Regarding your stated position that the planetary companions of pulsars are not actually planets (because “planets” must orbit stars and pulsars are not stars), this paper may prove enlightening:

    https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2017/12/aa31102-17/aa31102-17.html

    Fellow Cambridge astronomer Mihkel Kama is a co-author.

    I’ll say it again: arbitrarily excluding pulsar planets from consideration as exoplanets is bad science, and this blinkered view may come back to bite you.

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