The holiday buzz of late November shall soon be ruled by the food-filled furor of Thanksgiving family get-togethers and the looming chaos of once-a-year Black Friday retail raids.
In the meantime, for we of a geekier persuasion, we’ve always loved a certain holiday that sadly flies under traditional society’s radar: N7 Day, the Nov. 7 honorary holiday when fans of BioWare’s MASS EFFECT saga join together online to pay our respect to one of video game history’s most honored space-opera franchises.
Really, what better way to honor a series born of galactic exploration and just the right dash of plausible scientific basis’s than by marveling at more than 500 very real exoplanets discovered between 1988 and October 2015.
This stunning poster created by Slovakian writer and graphic artist Martin Vargic arranged a mere one-fourth of the confirmed exoplanets according to their estimated densities and temperatures. Vargic also took each planet’s other characteristics, such as their ages and stellar metallicities, into account as he arranged them with increasing temperatures from left to right and from the lowest densities at the bottom to the densest seeded at the top.
Each known class has been visualized to the most detailed possible accuracy of known scale and color, including super-Earths, hot Jupiters and Neptunes, gas dwarfs, diamond planets and water worlds, among others. The real thrill of lingering on this chart, of course, is considering how much life has possibly blossomed in such a short period in which the universe has been creating new exoplanets.
Within the “Goldilocks” range of a host star, liquid water may thrive within a neither too hot nor too cold span of temperatures that could realistically sustain organic life. Whether any of these planets may be habitable presents an entirley more complex query, but the universe has yet to create around 92% of the possibly habitable planets it could potentially support, according to NASAS and Kepler space telescope data’s suggestions.
Could a mass relay be out there waiting humankind to stumble through it? Possibly.
Who knows what may wait beyond the Milky Way?
View the extra larger version here
Source – Halycyonmaps
