University of California, Santa Cruz Develops Free App To Explore The Universe

We can now explore the cosmos with a touch of our fingertips using this innovative app for iPads and iPhones called the Kepler Explorer.  The app was named after NASA’s Kepler Mission in which they discovered roughly 2,000 distant planetary systems while scanning the Milky Way galaxy in search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of the stars they orbit.

The app starts off with a drop-down menu listing the planetary systems, plus our own solar system. Users can select a system, which is then displayed in a view that shows the planet or planets in orbit around their host star. Users can zoom in and move around the system, tapping on individual planets to explore further.

The planets shown in real time seem to be motionless, but with the touch of a slide bar, speed can be increased until the planets zip around their star. Users can also view the sizes of the individual planets in comparison to their host stars. Users can manipulate the composition of the planet and its atmosphere to see which mixtures of components are consistent with Kepler’s observations.

The Kepler Explorer app was developed by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz and will appeal to a wide range of audiences. Currently the app is free on iOS devices.