The Kepler Space Telescope continues to paint a fantastic picture of planets in our galaxy outside the Solar System – exoplanets as they’re known. It has now found upward of 4,000 of them, 2,356 of which have been confirmed. It has done this by very accurately measuring the light intensity from about 150,000 stars.
Tag: Analytics
Earthquake Analytics
I’ve been experimenting with various ways to present data in this blog, mainly using static screen shots of graphs. But over the weekend, I started exploring interactive options. In particular, there is a very capable tool out there called Tableau that provides a way to publish analytic graphics to the web, using their publicly available server to process the data. It has quite a lot of flexibility. The analyses below are my first foray into this endeavor. I also updated my earlier post on the Kepler telescope results to make it more interactive as well. All data is from the U.S. Geological Survey earthquake database. This first visualization shows the world-wide distribution of earthquakes from January 1, 1973 to October 14, 2011 from magnitude 4.9 to the maximum recorded of 9.1. The tectonic plate boundaries are easily visible. You can change the magnitude and year sliders to limit the data…
Worlds like our own
It’s incredible that in our lifetime we will know how many earth-like planets there are in the galaxy. The NASA Kepler mission has been staring at one patch of sky for more than a year now, looking for winking stars. These are the kind that dim ever-so-slightly when a planet passes between them and us. Finding Jupiters is relatively easy; finding Earths … not so much. But Kepler has shown that it is up to the task. A few weeks ago, the first results were published, and it turns out that out of about 150,000 stars, 54 of them have planets in the habitable zone – the distance from the star that might support liquid water on the surface. Is that incredible, or what? — 54! — It may not sound like much, but for all the centuries of people looking up into the sky and wondering if there were…