Kepler’s Planet Search

This is a great poster-style infographic in the New York Times about the how the Kepler telescope looks for planets in space.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/31/science/space/planet.html

The infographic explains in basic terms how Kepler looks at stars in a small square of space and keeps watch for “flickers” of light as potential planets pass in front of them.  Larger objects cause a greater “flicker”, naturally, but the actually decrease in brightness is still small.   There are also some nice presentations on confirming the existence of planets and the distribution, by mass, size, and orbit size, of the known exoplanets.

And it’s working:  six new planets, and counting!