Mike Wall
Space.com
May 7, 2014
A new video gives viewers a crash course in exoplanet science, comparing the speed of alien planets around other stars and the huge diversity of distant solar systems in just over a minute.
The 61-second video tour of alien planets — created by Ph.D. student Tom Hands of the University of Leicester in England — provides a flyby tour of all known planetary systems beyond Earth’s sun known to orbit a single star.
“I wanted to demonstrate the vast range of different timescales on which exoplanets orbit their host stars, from things which orbit at many times the separation of the Earth and sun over many hundreds of years, right down to planets which orbit so close to their star that they complete each orbit in just a few hours,” Hands said in a statement.
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