Kepler keeps finding more and more potentially habitable planets in our Universe — and it turns out that looking at them can be just as perplexing as thinking about them.
This video, by New Scientist, is a dizzying display of all 3538 known and candidate exoplanets that are part of multi-planet systems, as identified by NASA to date. New Scientist explains:
The animation shows Kepler discoveries in systems where more than one planet orbits a star, like our own. The digital orrery reveals the relative distances and motions for the worlds in each system: our solar system and its eight planets are shown in grey, while other colours represent exoplanets’ distances from their stars. Innermost worlds are red, second planets are yellow, thirds are green, fourths are light blue, fifths are dark blue and sixths are purple. The most colourful system is one dubbed KOI 351, the first we have found that is thought to have seven planets.
Mind boggling. [You Tube]