5000 planets found 😱😱.

Listen to 5,000 worlds beyond our solar system 🔊

This week, we announced that we have now confirmed the existence of over 5,000 exoplanets, or planets known to exist outside of our home star system. From small, rocky Earth-sized worlds to gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, we've been looking for more than 30 years to find these exoplanets' subtle signals: the dimming of a distant star as a planet passes in front of it, or a small shift in the star's movement from its planet's gravity.

This video is a sonification of all 5,005 confirmed exoplanets, turning their discovery over time into music-like sound. As each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle indicates the relative size of the planet's orbit and the color indicates which planet detection method was used to discover it: pink corresponds to radial velocity, purple to planetary transit, green to microlensing, red to timing variations, yellow to orbital brightness modulation, gray to astrometry, and blue to disk kinematics.

The music is created by playing a note for each newly discovered world. The pitch of the note indicates the relative orbital period of the planet. Planets that take a longer time to orbit their stars are heard as lower notes, while planets that orbit more quickly are heard as higher notes.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Russo, A. Santaguida (SYSTEM Sounds)

#NASA #Space #Astronomy #DataViz #Sonification #AWholeNewWorld