Watch Four Planets Spin Around a Star 130 Light-Years Away - Gizmodo

Astronomical phenomena tend to occur over timespans that dwarf our human scale—a galaxy changes over millions and billions of years, not decades.

But a new timelapse of observations of a distant star system shows its clockwork motion over just 12 years, packed into only a few seconds.

Recently, Jason Wang, an astrophysics professor at Northwestern University, used over a decade’s worth of observations of the system to create a five-second animation that depicts the motion of four large planets orbiting the star.

“For example, it isn’t apparent that Jupiter or Mars orbit our sun because we live in the same system and don’t have a top-down view.

“There’s nothing to be gained scientifically from watching the orbiting systems in a time lapse video, but it helps others appreciate what we’re studying,” Wang said.

Wang’s animations offer a tangible perspective to planetary motion—a phenomenon that we may have only been able to simulate or read about before.