Numerous Exoplanets

By Scott

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Back with a few more numbers for the Numerous app. This time, they are astronomy related.

I have followed with some interest the string of planets discovered over the past decade or so, and the other day I was wondering how many they had found thus far. Well, after a bit of snooping, I found several sites which have data related to exoplanets. Of course, finding the data on the web is nice, but I figured if the data are available, then it must be tracked in Numerous.

I was dreading have to screen scrape one of those sites to get the current counts. Fortunately, I found a site which had an API tied to their data. The NASA Exoplanet Archive located at Caltech offers a SQL-like interface into their data sets, so I have taken three of the numbers of most interest to me and turned them into Numerous data points.

First is a count of all confirmed exoplanets. This includes those confirmed by any means.

[ed. Sadly, now gone!]

The second is a count of all of those planets confirmed by the NASA Kepler Mission.

[ed. Sadly, now gone!]

Third, is a count of all of those Kepler planets which fall into what is considered the habitable [1] range. This includes both confirmed and candidate planets.

[ed. Sadly, now gone!]

Footnotes

  1. (180 K < Equilibrium (T) < 310 K) or (0.25 < Insolation (Earth flux) < 2.2)