Bruce Murray Space Image Library

A Comparison of Mass and Radius for Discovered Planets

A Comparison of Mass and Radius for Discovered Planets
A Comparison of Mass and Radius for Discovered Planets This graph displays all exoplanets with measured diameters and masses. Rocky planets form a tight line (lower left), but super-Earths/mini-Neptunes have widely varying atmospheres and densities. At Jupiter’s size, increasing mass no longer increases the diameter of a planet (upper right). Most of Kepler’s discoveries would be in the super-Earth/mini-Neptune region, but few of them have measured masses, so they do not appear here. This graph was originally published in "The Skies of Mini-Neptunes," an article by Hannah Wakeford for the March 2019 issue of The Planetary Report. Emily Lakdawalla and Loren A. Roberts for The Planetary Society based on data from exoplanets.org