- Credit: Jason Rowe – NASA/Kepler Mission
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has been on the prowl since 2009, busily sweeping space with a special photometer. That high-tech device continuously monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.
The data collected from these observations are being analyzed to detect periodic fluctuations that indicate the presence of “extrasolar” planets, that is, planets outside our solar system that are in the process of crossing the face of other stars.
Over 1,200 “candidate” bodies circling a parent star have been spotted by Kepler.
Thanks to the talent of Jason Rowe of the NASA Kepler Mission, he has put together a unique collage of planet candidates.
Rowe notes that this picture shows every Kepler planetary candidate host star with its transiting companion in silhouette. The sizes of the stars and transiting companions are properly scaled.
The colors of the stars are meant to represent how the eye would see the star outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Stars have been properly limb darkened and the companions have been offset relative to one another to match the modeled impact parameter. Some stars will even show more than one planet!
The largest star is 6.1 times larger than the Sun and the smallest stars are estimated to be only 0.3 times the radius of the Sun. The Sun is shown below the top row on the right by itself with the Earth and Jupiter in transit.
By LD/CSE