Video: New Kepler Orrery updates exoplanet families

In the Milky Way galaxy, it is planets, planets everywhere. This dizzying display shows the 1471 known and candidate exoplanets in multi-planet systems that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has helped us discover so far.

Launched in 2009, the spacecraft scanned a small portion of the sky for planets that transit their host stars – in other words, they cross in front of their stars as seen from Earth. The mission has confirmed the existence of 167 exoplanets and found thousands more possible worlds that are awaiting confirmation.


The animation shows Kepler discoveries in systems where more than one planet orbits a star, like our own. The digital orrery reveals the relative distances and motions for the worlds in each system: our solar system and its eight planets are shown in grey, while other colours represent exoplanets’ distances from their stars. Innermost worlds are red, second planets are yellow, thirds are green, fourths are light blue, fifths are dark blue and sixths are purple. The most colourful system is one dubbed KOI 351, the first we have found that is thought to have seven planets.

This is the third version of the Kepler orrery made by team member Daniel Fabrycky at the University of Chicago, who has been updating the animation every year or so since 2011.