What is this?

Based on the algorithm used by the game Frontier Elite II by David Braben, I decided to use the names of the known exoplanets to seed a random generator and make up an entire fake universe based on this. Due to the cleverness of this algorithm, the same planet will always be assigned the same fictitous properties, graphics and description.

The idea is to invent data to compensate for all the things we will probably not know anytime soon, as these planets are simply too far away for us to explore within the lifetime of this web page.

The list of exoplanets is fetched from NASA once per week. Once they update the list, any new exoplanets or even new information about existing ones will show up on the left (real) side of the data sheet.

So even though this is not a very scientific project (I do try to keep a clear separation between fact and fiction), I hope this strange little experiment will add some "color" to astronomy, thus making it more appealing to a wider audience.

-- Joachip