Celestia Forums

I've just committed a major update to extrasolar.ssc which incorporates all the new orbital data compiled by Butler et al., with the exception of the four-planet mu Ara system for which more recent data are available.
A scattering of distant and poorly characterized exoplanet orbits not treated by Butler et al. persist in the file: they are, as previously, based on information in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia. InfoURLs link to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia as previously, since it still provides an excellent reference list for all exoplanets.
Get the new file on the CVS tree at:
http://celestia.cvs.sourceforge.net/celestia/celestia/data/extrasolar.ssc

Grant

Great !

Thanks a lot for this extraordinary work, Grant ! This is really appreciated ! You should see some of my students, when they see the exoplanets "live". Some are literally dreaming about all this.

First off, thanks for the update!

The new fit for 55 Cancri is interesting - the eccentricities of the planets are much lower. I've played around with the system with the systemic console, while I can quite easily believe lower eccentricities for the inner system, I can't quite see how they got a near-circular outer planet from the data.

Also, I think the texture assignments need a bit of updating, reading the follow-up paper to the one I used when I created the textures, it seems that the dividing lines should be moved to:

150 K (as measured for a class I planet) for the I-II dividing line
250 K (as measured for a class II planet) for the II-III dividing line
800 K (as measured for a class III planet) for the III-IV dividing line
1400 K (as measured for a class IV planet) for the IV-V dividing line

In addition, the exoplanet host star Gliese 436 is apparently missing from starnames.dat