Exoplanet Explorer 2.5.11: Two new Earths?
The holidays are over and it’s time for an Exoplanet Explorer update.
The HD version gets 22 new planets that were announced in the past month or so. Both versions get some minor improvements and bug fixes.
Amongst the new planets are two terran worlds in the habitable zone of their stars!
Kepler-438 b
At 1.27 times the Earth’s mass, this rock and iron planet’s surface gravity is a familiar 1.01G. Featuring a surface temperature of 37 celsius/99 fahrenheit, this planet whips around its orange K-class star in just 35 days.
Kepler-442 b
Another rock and iron planet, this frigid world has an average surface temperature of -3 celcius/27 farenheight. With a mass 2.34 times the Earth, the surface gravity is a challenging 1.3G. Each orbit of its K-class star takes a leisurely 112 Earth days.
Our planet collection is growing
A quick check of the database shows that the two new warm, terran worlds brings the total to 11.
I remember when I first started this project, many of the categories had just a handful, or even a solitary planet.
Some of the categories are still zero. This includes mainly the cold or warm mercuian and subterran classes. The only cold sub-terran on the list is actually Mars, because that’s the category it belongs to.
These low-mass worlds has been very hard to detect using current techniques. However, a few hot mercurian and subterran planets have been spotted. Hot worlds are easier to detect because they are close enough to their star to clearly affect its motion or to be visible passing in front of the star from our point of view. As technology improves these distant and small, cool worlds will start to show up in the database. Exciting times!
Below are screenshots of Exoplanet Explorer’s stats in October 2012 and January 2015.
Planet stats October 2012
Planet stats January 2015
What’s next
Next month’s update will include upgraded search functionality to allow you save and later load your favourite searches.
I’ll also come up with a few more preset searches to find some of the more interesting or exotic worlds.