A graduate student at the University of Leicester in England has created a video taking would-be astronauts on a one-minute flyby of 1,774 extrasolar planets in 1,081 star systems outside of our solar system.
WATCH:
“I wanted to demonstrate the vast range of different time-scales on which exoplanets orbit their host stars, from things which orbit at many times the separation of the Earth and Sun over many hundreds of years, right down to planets which orbit so close to their star that they complete each orbit in just a few hours,” student Tom Hands said on the University’s website.
“I find it fascinating just how much these exoplanetary systems differ from our own system in scale.”
Hands used the Open Exoplanet Catalogue to pull data for the video, which the student included in his astrophysics doctorate research.
Currently the catalogue lists 1,776 confirmed exoplanets and 1,082 planetary systems, but astronomers speculate there are at least 100 billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered 3,845 of those potential exoplanets to date, the Huffington Post reports.