Project Description

Animated Mass-Radius Diagram

In 2022, Prof. Sara Seager asked me to create an animated version of Figure 4 from her paper “Mass-Radius Relationships for Solid Exoplanets”, published in 2007. The original showed all known transiting exoplanets at the time it was published; however, it predated both Kepler and TESS, so there were no more than a couple dozen such planets known. We updated it using modern data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, as well as measurements of exoplanetary atmospheres from the IAC ExoAtmospheres community database.

The end result was a series of plots, showing the dramatic increase in the number of known exoplanets, as well as recent discoveries of lower mass, smaller, rocky worlds. This animated version features a dark background for use in Prof. Seager’s talks.

Click here to see the animation again.