All thanks to NASA, you’re now able to traverse to cosmos and explore exoplanets hundreds of lightyears away. The space agency has started to promote its Exoplanet Travel Bureau, a virtual effort to get more eyes on some of the outfit’s largest discoveries. While you can’t actually hop on a space ship and travel to the Andromeda Galaxy just quite yet, NASA’s website is a surprisingly powerful tool in helping parents and kids alike learn more about the great beyond.
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NASA shared vintage-style posters of some of its more popular exoplanet discoveries, including the Earth clones in the Trappist system to the lava-filled 55 Cancri e and Kepler-186f.
Beyond the stellar posters, which the agency made free to use and print, there’s also an interactive feature that allows you to explore exoplanets within their respective star systems.
“Now we live in a universe of exoplanets. The count of confirmed planets is in the thousands and rising,” NASA’s exoplanet site reads. “That’s from only a small sampling of the galaxy as a whole. The count could rise to the tens of thousands within a decade, as we increase the number, and observing power, of robotic telescopes lofted into space.”
It adds, “Most exoplanets are found through indirect methods: measuring the dimming of a star that happens to have a planet pass in front of it, called the transit method, or monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet pulling on its star and causing its light to subtly Doppler shift. Space telescopes have found thousands of planets by observing “transits,” the slight dimming of light from a star when its tiny planet passes between it and our telescopes. Other detection methods include gravitational lensing, the so-called ‘wobble method.’”
You can visit the Exoplanet Travel Bureau website here.
Cover photo by NASA-JPL/Caltech
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