“Zooplanetarium”: 1,600 exoplanets condensed into a single image

To date, according to NASA, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way alone. These “worlds” are those that orbit a star other than our Sun. But the figure is minimal if we take into account the entire universe: we would be talking about 100 billion exoplanets, which would be equivalent to saying that there are, At least 12 exoplanets for every inhabitant of the Earth.

The problem is that the numbers are so vast that it is difficult, almost impossible, to put them into perspective. To do this, Martin VargicSlovak artist and author of the book The Curious Cosmic Compendiumcreated a series of infographics that They add up all the exoplanets known to date.

The first infographic, Icy and Rocky Worlds, contains More than 900 Earth-sized planets and a “super-Earth” illustrated individually and sorted by temperature. There they are, arranged in order, rocky planets below six Earth masses.

The second infographic, Exoplanet Zoo, is an “extraplanetary zoo” focused on the largest gas and ice giants. Both infographics took six to seven months to complete, and he worked on them simultaneously while creating planetary textures and rendering the planets one by one.

Vargic wanted to reflect the wide variety of exoplanets in the infographics. “I tried to include a good, representative number of exoplanets from all temperature classes, from cryogenic to hot, to get the maximum variety, as well as Most exoplanets that hold records“, the artist said in an interview. The illustrations include the largest, hottest and most distant exoplanets known.

Rocky and ice planets, designed by Martin VargicMartin VargicMartin Vargic

Among his favorites is Kepler 277b, an ultra-dense rocky planet more massive than Saturn and with a surface gravity of more than 10 Gs. Another of his favorites is WASP-12 b, a giant, swollen, hot planet, as if Jupiter had been stretched into the shape of an eggwhich is being consumed by its star.

His pantheon of exoplanets includes extreme worlds unlike any other in the solar system, from lava planets in the process of being vaporized by their star to ones where salts, silicates, metals, and even diamonds evaporate and condense to form exotic clouds, rain, and hail. Vargic is excited about studying these worlds, however, because “the possibility of finding habitable exoplanets that could shed much light on the origin and nature of life or nurture intelligent civilizations like nothing we can imagine.”

To carry out this task, he relied on the Observations made by ground-based and space-based telescopes from both NASA and ESA. A future project will be to make a large infographic showing all known exoplanets, to date 6802 in total,