Difference between revisions of "1071: Exoplanets"
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Revision as of 18:09, 1 November 2013
Explanation
This one is an interesting one. This is a relatively simple comic that relies only on scale to get its point across. The point being that there are tons and tons of planets in our galaxy and we need to learn about every one of them as soon as possible.
As a point of reference, an exoplanet is a planet that is outside of our solar system and thus orbits a different sun. We only have a few ways of finding exoplanets. The main method being to observe stars and notice when they seem to get dimmer. This means that some body of matter has passed "in front" of that star (more correctly, between that star and us, blocking some of the light from reaching us).
This comic was made in response to scientists finally having the right equipment and finding a roughly Earth-sized planet. Previously, we had only found planets approximately Jupiter size or larger.
Exoplanets have been discussed before in comic 786: Exoplanets.
Transcript
- [An enormous diagram of dots, mostly of varying shades of brown and greenish yellow, with a number of smaller blue dots and larger red dots.]
- All 786 known planets (as of June 2012) to scale.
- (Some planet sizes estimated based on mass)
- This [indicating a small section of 8 planets out of the several hundreds] is our solar system. The rest of these orbit other stars and were only discovered recently. Most of them are huge because those are the kind we learned to detect first, but now we're finding that small ones are actually more common. We know nothing about what's on any of them. With better telescopes, that could change. This is an exciting time.
Discussion
Hmm... this comic and 786 have the same title. Is that a mistake? Jimmy C (talk) 01:07, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
- It may very well have been on xkcd itself; there was a bit of a snafu when Randall posted the image. That's part of the reason why we decided on number+name here, to ensure that that sort of naming collision couldn't be repeated. -- IronyChef (talk) 04:39, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
- It's also worth mentioning that 786 is both the number of the other strip, and the number of planets in this one. 93.144.215.90 22:38, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
The image isn't appearing for me. I think it's a problem with the thumbnail system. Bugefun (talk) 18:15, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Same on ipad. DruidDriver (talk) 07:12, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
And on Firefox. --68.200.188.141 01:01, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
Not showing up in Chrome. Alpha (talk) 23:14, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
As a side note, the pace at which we're discovering exoplanets is accelerating. The first confirmed planet-sized mass outside our solar system was discovered in 1992, and it was ten years until we could celebrate the discovery of the 100th exoplanet. In the fifteen months since this comic was posted, another 156 exoplanets have been discovered (source: Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, which lists 942 exoplanets as of 2 Sep 2013). Frijole (talk) 22:41, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
There are 786 exoplanets listed in the comic, And the previous comic about exoplanets is comic 786..... Coincidence? 108.162.222.44 08:58, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
- I think it's possible that he was waiting for the count to increase to that number to create some sort of meta-pun. With Randall, you never know, but the odds of that happening independently seems unfathomable to me. 108.162.238.117 16:12, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
- Additional comment: I believe the original filename for 768 was just "exoplanets.png" before being changed to "exoplanets_2010.png" when this comic was released. Any website that hotlinked the first comic would have their image replaced with the newest one. 108.162.238.117 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
Does anybody else see this and think colorblindness test? 173.245.55.86 22:43, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
- Absolutely. Saw this from across the room (sometimes my machine takes a while to load) and thought it was a colourblindness statement rather than a planetary one. 162.158.6.128 20:41, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
- Three levels deep.. Remind anyone of Inception?A2658742 (talk) 08:36, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
This comic is referenced on exoplanet.eu, a professional site for exoplanet scientists, as the first link on a page titled "General professional Web sites relevant to extrasolar planets". The actual link goes to an interactive version of the page, but the link is at http://exoplanet.eu/sites/ labeled "Exoplanets: an interactive version of XKCD 1071". The actual interactive page is http://codementum.org/exoplanets/ . N. Kalanaga 13:58 (UTC-4) 10 April 2016
Was it actually 786 exoplanets known back then, or 786 planets including both the exoplanets and our own solar system? I would read the caption the latter way. This would make the number of exoplanets 778, like they also count it here and here, while this explanation here mentions 786 exoplanets several times. --YMS (talk) 09:25, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
- I could count them, but... I don't really feel like spending ~4 minutes straight on counting dots. 172.69.54.123 10:26, 29 March 2018 (UTC)