500 Planets On One Exquisite Chart

At the same time our solar system has been busy culling its planet herd (goodbye, Pluto) the rest of the solar system has been busy adding them—or at least we’ve been busy discovering them. Though it had always been anthropocentric in the extreme to assume that in a galaxy filled with 300 billion stars and a universe with perhaps 100 billion galaxies, ours was the only solar system extant. It wasn’t until 1995, however, that astronomers discovered the first so-called exoplanet—Pegasi 51b, more than 50 light years from Earth.

Since then, nearly 2,000 confirmed exoplanets have been discovered—most by the Kepler Space Telescope—and thousands more candidate planets await confirmation. Below are just 500 of them depicted on a sort of periodic table of the planets, by Slovak graphic designer Martin Vargic. Best known for his celebrated map of the Internet, Vargic has produced dozens of other maps and graphics, including a timeline of the universe, and imagined images of an Earthly horizon if our planet orbited other known stars.