NASA just dropped an astonishingly elaborate map of more than 4,000 exoplanets known to exist outside our Solar System, which takes the form of a video that shows how many exoplanets we’ve discovered each year since 1991.
Exoplanets are not only interesting to us because they orbit a different star, but also because they have the potential to harbor life.
It’s an impressive visualization of the exponential rate at which we’re discovering outside worlds many light-years away. That’s in part thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s now-retired orbital imaging craft that searched the far reaches of deep space for exoplanets since it launched in 2009.
