Exoplanet 4+

I originally got this app for my own personal use years ago. With the wealth of exoplanet detections that were starting to pour in (and continue to pour in to this day), this app made perusing this freely accessible but highly technical data intuitive and easy! The design of the app was and continues to be excellent. Updates have been slow but steady over the decade, adding enough features to keep things interesting and exciting, while avoiding the over-complication that apps often succumb to once achieving a little success. If you are curious about what planets are out there, I can’t recommend this app enough.

Recently, I have begun to see this app’s educational potential as well. With a few dollars of paid upgrades the app functions as an excellent interactive map of the universe that can be used with screen mirroring to turn a lecture hall into an impromptu planetarium. The free version is suitable to used by students (I teach an introductory university astronomy class for non-majors) to explore the know extra-solar planets in an intuitive way, and even make correlation plots of exoplanet data to better understand the statistics of the known planets. I have yet to find an alternative that is as clear, intuitive, and focused, and therefore suitable for an educational environment.

This complex app, Exoplanet, is an extremely educational free app made for iOS (version 17.1.0). It is designed to provide interactive visualizations and animations in order to share information on all known exoplanets. An exoplanet is a planet orbiting stars beyond our own Solar System.

This app is designed for anyone ages 4 and up. Exoplanet is advertised as extremely accurate and anyone using it can be assured that they can rely on its data having been developed and maintained by a professional astronomer.

The app is also visually pleasing. For instance, if the milky way option is selected you are given a wonderful visualization of the Milky Way galaxy with labels to include the Sun. You can zoom in or search for any star, constellation, or planet and it will show you the location of the searched star or planet and along with its surroundings.

This app is chalked full of information! You can choose any planet and it will give you information such as the mass, radius, density, orbital period, and more! This app would be great for projects or research because it provides information on the Milky Way, extrasolar planets, spacecrafts, asteroids, galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background. The more I researched it the more I realized that this app exceeded my expectations! If you’re looking for an intriguing app full of information about space, Exoplanet is for you!

This app is awesome. Whenever a seemingly unsolvable or unscalable human problem comes along, I open this app and look through the cosmos to remind myself that my problems are but a trifle in this universe. It also reminds me that there is a lot left to explore and a lot left to do over mind blowing distances and gives me some hope that humanity will get its collective stuff together to focus on galactic expansion versus the navel gazing territorial squabbling we are currently engaged in. This app is akin to the work Galileo, Copernicus, Hubble (and other astronomers and teams of astronomers) did to help humanity see itself accordingly. Keep up the good work!