NASA WebGL of the Universe | Hacker News Reader

NASA WebGL of the Universe

exoplanets.nasa.gov

90 pointsaronowb1412 comments

Cool stuff. However, maybe the post could be titled "NASA WebGL of the galaxy", since it only seems to focus on the Milky Way.

The only known exoplanets are in the Milky Way - we can't yet detect them around the vastly more distant stars of other galaxies, except perhaps in the rarest of circumtances.

Yeah, that's exactly why they're focusing on the Milky Way and not the whole universe, and thus the title is a little bit off.

If you're wondering about the non-uniformity, it seems like Kepler stares in certain directions a lot which means it finds more things there.

yeah, it's kinda cool that wherever we look, we find planets :)

Also, 1 exoplanet per star? That seems a bit low? Anyone know why we don't assume there's 8 planets per star?

Not an astronomer but if I'm not mistaken, we find exoplanets based on the shadows from their respective stars, we can usually tell if a star has multiple planets orbiting based on the amount of light we see, it's just that it's strangely more common to only have 1 planet orbiting each star, instead of the many we have.

Several of the methods used for finding exoplanets are biased so that they're more likely to find exoplanets that are both really big (Jupiter-size or bigger) and really close to their star (much closer than Earth)

As methods of detecting exoplanets get better, I think they're starting to find more systems with multiple planets so the average is probably more than 1

This is a 13 year old article about NASA go to metric.

https://www.space.com/3332-nasa-finally-metric.html

Why on earth are they using miles on this webpage?

If you zoom out to about 100,000 light-years and rotate to above the ecliptic of the galaxy, then the software displays the rest of the stars in the galaxy also. A cool perspective on the data.

As usual with all the cool demos, seems to be broken on Firefox

Ok, but how? I haven't noticed any problem yet.

Works for me on Firefox 82.0.2

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