skeptv:

All 2299 Kepler exoplanet candidates orbiting one star

If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that’s because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far.

This animation made by Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, shows all 2299 of the most likely planetary candidates found by Kepler up until 27th February 2012 as if they orbited just one star. Each planet is drawn to scale with the host star, and its colour represents an estimate of the planet’s temperature.

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