Countless Planets

 

"Stars in the NeighborHood" makes it easy to see this by marking the orbits of each of the planets.  In the "Zoom Out Universe" feature, you'll see the lopsided orbits of Mercury, Mars, and Pluto.  You'll see just how close red planet Mars and evening star Venus come to Earth's orbit.  And you'll see how much more widely spaced the outer gas giant planets are from their terrestrial kin — the giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  You'll see not only how tilted is the orbit of Pluto, but how eccentric it is, coming closer to the Sun than Neptune over a large stretch of its year.  As you move farther out, you'll also notice how small is the orbit of Pluto compared to the great emptiness beyond.

 

All the while, you know there are other planets out there, in other star systems.  From the 1990's, scientists have discovered dozens of stars with Jupiter-sized planets, or larger.  Where there are big ones, there are bound to be smaller ones, too.  "Stars in the NeighborHood" can show which stars are known to have planets, all with a simple click on the "Planets" check box, in "Hood Tools."  Right now, it's hard to tell which star systems are completely devoid of planets.  It may very well turn out that there are many more planets than there are countless stars in the heavens.

 

 

Garden Spots of the Galaxy

And, by opening up the special "Garden Spots" User file, you can see tagged all the star systems that are mature enough to have habitable planets — worlds where life is possible.  You see, it's not enough to have planets, to be really interesting.

 

Very young star systems can have planets, or proto-planets in the making, but life wouldn't stand a chance there — not with it raining meteorites all day long.  You'd have to wait several hundred million years for some systems to finish "baking" — perhaps even one or two billion years.  Where the "Garden Spots" tags overlap with the planet tags are special places, indeed.  These are the systems with planets that might be old enough to have formed life and breathable air.  These are the prime candidates for finding habitable worlds.

 

 

Free Updates of Extra-Solar Planets

As scientists discover new planets in other star systems, these will be added to the "Stars in the NeighborHood" data files.  These will be made available for you to download, free of charge, to update your software.

 

As you move out of the Solar System, you pass through the Oort Cloud of cometary material.  You'll be amazed how large this cloud is compared to the space between us and our next-door neighbors.