The world is incredible, there’s no doubt about it, and we’ve arrived at a technological era that allows us to explore further than our stars, to look out further past the Milky Way and off into distant galaxies and solar systems that extend further than our wildest dreams. Today, astronomers around the world (pun intended) have detected over 1,700 additional solar planets, better known as exoplanets, with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. It’s still hard to visualize so many planets up in the sky, however a second-year astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington, named Ethan Kruse, has developed a truly mesmerizing animation which tries to put it all in perspective…

Read on for details on the Kepler Orrery IV, and the full version of this astonishing animation.

What you can see here is our solar system (located on the right of the GIF!) amongst every other planet that the Kepler telescope has discovered since we started looking in 2009. In total, the animation reveals, quite amazingly, 1,705 exoplanets in 685 planetary systems, how incredible is that?

As somebody who is hugely interested in astronomy, this animation has me straight up hypnotised. Every circle you see is essentially to scale, in both size and speed of which they rotate. So, what we can conclude is that there are plenty of exoplanets along the stars that are much bigger and moving much faster than the planets in our solar system. You can view the whole animation (which is a time-lapse running over several months) by clicking here: Kepler IV Animation.

Some scientists out there even think that in years to come, we could very much so discover the first signs of extraterrestrial life. What a scary thought! Anyway, I’d love to hear your say on this…

Feel free to comment down below on how you feel about our perhaps never-ending galaxy, how you feel about the possibility for other life out there, and whatever else you want to talk about regarding our amazing universe!

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