Durham uni ppl - Space Apps Challenge

Durham uni ppl| Hey! What Are You Looking At?

Awards & Nominations

Durham uni ppl has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist

Hey! What Are You Looking At?

The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) archives space agencies' data from missions studying electromagnetic radiation from extremely energetic cosmic phenomena (e.g., gravitational wave detections, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae). The Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) is another repository containing missions studying comets, asteroids, and exoplanets among other things. Your challenge is to create a visualization tool that can help people interested in these phenomena to access the data quickly and easily.

Hey! What are you looking at?

Summary

"Get Excited About Exoplanets" is an interactive website that allows users to see a visualization of every known exoplanet in existence and find out more about their name, mass, size, and distance from our solar system. We coded the website in Javascript and we used python packages as well as Nasa's exoplanet database archive for the visualization model. We added a feature that enables the user to hover over every exoplanet (represented by a dot in on the graph) and see relevant data (name, mass, radius, distance from solar system). We hope that future improvements on this website will enhance the interactive feature and offer a 3-D virtual reality experience of exoplanets.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our team developed an exoplanet visualisation tool to emphasize the important of exoplanets and their properties, and to create an intuitive interface for investigating these. This took the form of a Python program where the user can interact with a full-sky image to view data on each exoplanet, as well as seeing their distribution. We decided to include the name, mass, radius and distance of each exoplanet since these give a sense of the diverse range that planets can take, with many being larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. We also created a simple website with general information for amateur astronomers and embedded an image of the sky featuring all the exoplanets in the dataset.

How We Developed This Project

As a team of physics students, we are all interested in astrophysics and its presentation to the wider public. One of our members is about to undertake a year-long project on exoplanets and so we decided to focus on them. We undertook simple web development to create a front-end interface and back-end hosting service (programmed using HTML, CSS and Javascript via NodeJS) in parallel with a Python program. For the latter, we used scientific Python packages as well as data-plotting packages to help us process the dataset. Our plan was to use the package mpld3 to create a browser-compatible representation of our interactive program, but unfortunately this package does not support either 3D plots or elliptical projections of 3D data.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used data from NASA's exoplanet archive as an integral part of our project since we plotted each exoplanet's position on the night sky as well as included extra information about the planet in our interactive visualisation.