This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
These are the orbits of every potential habitable planet in our galaxy detected by the Nasa Kepler mission -- all 233 of them. Created by University of California, Berkeley astronomer Alex Harrison Parker, the visualisation depicts only planets whose distance from a star allows the formation of water, and displays each orbit over the course of 1,000 days as a sine wave. A complete orbit runs from peak to peak; the width of the line represents the
planet's size. "Kepler monitors over 100,000 stars continuously," Parker explains. "Periodically, there are very small dips in the brightness of the star as a candidate planet passes in front. The duration between those events tells us how long it takes the planet to complete a single orbit."
This visualisation allows astronomers to estimate a range of information about the planets, including mass and temperature, and has led to the discovery of one potentially Earth-like planet, Kepler-186f. But Parker stresses that habitability is not as simple as a planet's distance from its star. "Venus is in the habitable zone," he explains. "But because of its atmosphere, it's totally uninhabitable."
Although Kepler's original mission was interrupted in May 2013 by a system failure, the planet search continues. For one thing there is still a wealth of data to be analysed -- 3,257 candidates remain to be confirmed as actual planets. And in May, Nasa announced the start of a new mission, K2, which uses solar winds to stabilise the telescope, allowing it to continue searching out planets. Good hunting, Kepler.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
