4 ms·
NASA WebGL of the Universe
- saagarjha 6y agoIf you're wondering about the non-uniformity, it seems like Kepler stares in certain directions a lot which means it finds more things there.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoyeah, it's kinda cool that wherever we look, we find planets :) Also, 1 exoplanet per star? That seems a bit low? Anyone know why we don't assume there's 8 planets per star?
- conradludgate 6y agoNot an astronomer but if I'm not mistaken, we find exoplanets based on the shadows from their respective stars, we can usually tell if a star has multiple planets orbiting based on the amount of light we see, it's just that it's strangely more common to only have 1 planet orbiting each star, instead of the many we have.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoSeveral of the methods used for finding exoplanets are biased so that they're more likely to find exoplanets that are both really big (Jupiter-size or bigger) and really close to their star (much closer than Earth) As methods of detecting exoplanets get better, I think they're starting to find more systems with multiple planets so the average is probably more than 1
- brianush1 6y agoAs usual with all the cool demos, seems to be broken on Firefox
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- container 6y agoOk, but how? I haven't noticed any problem yet.
- animal_spirits 6y agoWorks for me on Firefox 82.0.2
- container 6y agoCool stuff. However, maybe the post could be titled "NASA WebGL of the galaxy", since it only seems to focus on the Milky Way.
- Recurecur 6y agoThe only known exoplanets are in the Milky Way - we can't yet detect them around the vastly more distant stars of other galaxies, except perhaps in the rarest of circumtances.
- container 6y agoYeah, that's exactly why they're focusing on the Milky Way and not the whole universe, and thus the title is a little bit off.
- njarboe 6y agoIf you zoom out to about 100,000 light-years and rotate to above the ecliptic of the galaxy, then the software displays the rest of the stars in the galaxy also. A cool perspective on the data.
- andy_threos_io 6y agoThis is a 13 year old article about NASA go to metric. https://www.space.com/3332-nasa-finally-metric.html https://www.space.com/3332-nasa-finally-metric.html Why on earth are they using miles on this webpage?