Giving perspective to the search for Earth-like planets, a new data visualization displays more a thousand extrasolar planet candidates as if they were orbiting our sun.

The 1,236 exoplanet candidates shown in the video (above) have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space-based observatory since its March 2009 launch. The latest trove of data was released Feb. 3 in Nature.

Jer Thorp, a data-artist-in-residence at New York University, said Kepler’s surprising number of discoveries inspired him to build the visualization in two afternoons with the programming language Processing.

“I sent out a tweet asking if anybody had the data, and somebody sent me the paper,” Thorp wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It seemed like a really fun data set to visualize, and I also figured it would help me to understand a bit more about the science behind the Kepler project.”

Nearly all of the planets fit between Earth’s orbit and the sun, Thorp noticed, because the planets’ orbits are tight and fast around their parent stars. This makes them easier targets for Kepler, which stares at roughly 145,000 stars to detect slight changes in brightness as planets pass by. Out of all the exoplanet candidates, two in the visualization labelled KOI 326.01 and KOI 314.02 have the best chance so far of meeting Earth-like habitability criteria.

Thorp said he has been working on software-based art for 7 or 8 years, but eventually started working on projects with more “real” data like Kepler’s.

“I have done some science visualizations in the past, and will very likely do more in the future,” Thorp wrote. “I’m always intrigued by novel datasets and visualization challenges, and science is certainly rich in both of these things.”

Video: Kepler’s exoplanet candidates compared to the solar system. Estimated size is shown by the diameter of dots, and dot color indicates temperature. Hotter planets are red and cooler planets are blue. (Earth is a habitable pale blue.) (Courtesy Jer Thorp/blprnt.com. Music courtesy of PumpAudio.com.)

Via Vimeo, BoingBoing

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