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This awesome animation by Alex Parker (whose Kepler-11 Sonata video is also excellent) illustrates the 2299 fast-transiting planets discovered to so far by the Kepler mission and their orbits to-scale around a single star.

There’s a wealth of detail in this rendering like colour/temperature correlation and the white rings representing Mercury, Venus and Earth’s orbits and that’s all elaborated on on it’s vimeo page. But all you need to know is this part of the description:

Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!

Planets. 2299 of them. Up there. And all of them were found in a really short period of time, with still so many more out there yet to discovered.

Fuck yeah, you bet I love this science stuff.

In this video, astrophysics graduate Alex Parker has taken the orbital information about the Kepler-11 system and, by corresponding a musical note with each planets’ transit, has created a beautifully unique sonata.

…The pitch (note) is determined by the planet’s distance from its star (closer=higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger=louder).

The near-4:5 mean-motion resonance of the innermost two planets is audible as the notes “beat” against each other.

A triple-transit (three planets crossing the face of the star at once) in August 2010 is also audible. This event is what is illustrated in the artist’s impression of the system used in cover photo.