ScienceEpic Blogs

Visualizing confirmed exoplanet detection with Tableau.

Every human child has at one point in their lives dreamed of venturing to the stars and exploring other worlds. For some of those children those dreams manifest themselves in the form trance music played in cave on the southern hemisphere during the longest night of the year, the winter solstice.

For others it manifests as a desire to pursue a career in radio astronomy. I'm on the path of the latter.

Here is proof:

Can't stop this Sagan in the makin. Radio astronomy is awesome.

The search for Exoplanets.

In the last 20 years humanity has begun an incredible preliminary exploration of nearby solar systems that may contain worlds in orbit around other stars.

Using data visualization software Tableau Public as part of my semester break project I have compiled some interesting perspectives on the variety of confirmed exoplanets that exist outside our solar systems, thus producing a series of info-graphics I call the "Infographica Galactica" which is a play on words on the "Encyclopedia Galactica"

This blog post details the development of this project.

Now, radio astronomy and planetary science are two different disciplines. One deals with light at low frequency and the other deals with wandering bodies in orbit around stars but both are connected by the practice of data mining and the art of knowledge discovery and that is exactly the type of approach that will be taken in this project.

*literature review on the planets.

The search for planets beyond our solar system goes hand in hand with the search for extraterrestrial life. So far we only have one model to go on to study the emergence of life in the entire Universe and that is planet Earth in our own solar system. (The verdicts on Mars and Europa have yet to be decided). Therefore, the search for exoplanets boils down to the quest of looking for planets that are "Earth Size" and "Earth like"

We must then establish the distinction between planets that are "Earth Size" and "Earth Like"

NASA Exoplanet Database. the 4,000 worlds

NASA keeps an database archive of confirmed exoplanets. So far there have been 4,000 worlds known without a doubt to exist beyond our solar system. A full list of the planets can be downloaded which makes for great exercise in data mining depending on what you are looking for.

There is separate table available that details the definition of each parameter in the confirmed planets table:

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=planets

There is separate table available that details the definition of each attribute in the confirmed planets table:

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/API_exoplanet_columns.html

As part of literature review I need to understand what each term does and whether it has any significance for visualization. There are 5 tables detailing terms on the confirmed exoplanet table. Each table corresponds to a different characteristic.