Interactive visual exploration for the analysis of current knowledge about exoplanets

Abstract

The subject of exoplanet research is one of astronomy and astrophysics hottest topics. To this day, over four thousand exoplanet detections have been confirmed and the number is steadily rising. The interest on this subject warrants the case for the development of a visualization tool for dealing with exoplanet data. The goal behind this is to provide an advanced visualization approach for the interactive exploratory analysis of the detected exoplanets and their characteristics as well as the effective transmission to third parties of both the facts known a priori and new findings. In this paper, the design, methodology and results of developing several idioms are described in depth. The visualization is centred on answering four main user research questions: 1. How has the search and discovery of exoplanets evolved through time? 2. Is it possible to distinguish between different types of exoplanets? 3. Labeling Stars: which types of stars are being searched for exoplanets? 4. What makes an exoplanet potentially habitable? The final results and source code have been uploaded to a public GitHub repository and deployed in this site.