This Graphic Designer Gave Us a Closer Look at the 500 Known Exoplanets. So Cool
Martin Vargic is a Slovakian graphic designer who has just put together an epic poster that is literally out of this world. As of October 2015, there are 500 known exoplanets in the universe, and he's brought them all together.
He explained to Gizmodo: "This visualisation shows more than 500 exoplanets discovered before October 2015 (about 1/4 of all exoplanets yet discovered), arranged according to their temperature and density, showing the incredible variety of the extraterrestrial worlds."
It's important, first off, to understand these are artistic imaginings of the known exoplanets, as very little have actually been seen. Vargic explains:
"All visualisations are based on the estimated radius and temperature of the planet, however other factors, such as density, age or stellar metallicity were also taken into consideration."
In the words of Vargic:
"Various known classes of exoplanets are shown on the graphic, such as Super-Earths, Hot Jupiters, Hot Neptunes, water worlds, gas dwarfs or superdense diamond planets."
Known images of these exoplanets are sparse, and barely visible (hard to make out), so even with the future of telescopes, we'll probably never see images of exoplanets in this much detail. It's a big world out there, and this poster is literally not even a small fraction of it. Minute maybe? Minuscule?
Whatever, point is, these 500 planets exist and you probably didn't even known about them until now, so take a moment and reflect on just how vast our universe really is.