When you have one-thousand thirty eight confirmed exoplanets. you get to do some pretty cool things with all of that data. The Open Exoplanet Catalogue put together a really cool bubble chart of these planets’ sizes and temperatures.
Pretty, isn’t it? And there’s a whole lot of information packed into each bubble. The size of the bubble corresponds to the relative size of the planet and its color corresponds to its equilibrium temperature. We can think of a planet’s equilibrium temperature as an idealized case where the planet is only heated by its parent star, and there is no warming or cooling due to the planet’s atmosphere. Of course, that’s never the case in real life and that’s why the the folks at the Open Exoplanet Catalogue were careful to point out that “green might be right.”
Take a look at the visualization yourself and spend a few minutes (or hours) hovering over the planets. Visualizations like these are a great way to explore large sets of data like these all at once. And with another 1,073 (and counting) unconfirmed exoplanets, there’s going to be an ever-expanding dataset to explore.