Exohabitat: a gateway where curiosity meets cosmos

The project investigates the possibility of exoplanets being habitable using a combination of data sources such as the Habitable Worlds Catalog (HWC) and the NASA Exoplanet Archive reporting on thousands of exoplanets that contains data such as radius, density, distance from star, spectroscopy etc. The project intends to determine the habitability of these planets with the mentioned parameters. The project is going to utilize four models, a Decision Tree Classifier that maps planets into types, rocky, gaseous, and so on; K means, which is utilized for the amount of radiation received from a star and space; a convolutional neural network and multi-layer perceptron for analysis of graphs of the spectrographs of the planet to help estimate atmospheric compositions; a random output regressor to analyze and calculate the Earth Similarity Index (ESI) of the planet. The four models are combined, each assessing a specific characteristic of the exoplanet to provide a habitability score, which evaluates whether a planet has the capacity to sustain life the way we know it. For additional interaction and visualization of the information, we have implemented a universe sandbox, i.e. a simulation to assess the implications of characteristics of these planets in comparison to earth, such as weight difference using the simulation of a freely falling body. Through this sandbox you can utilize your own characteristics and play with it to dissect the impacts. The sandbox provides a fun interactive way to instill interest in kids educating them about astronomy and physics. Investigation of exoplanets was done to assess the variations between both bodies. A few exoplanets exhibit some elements to be habitable even considering they are light years away, although indication of habitability is a crucial step to examining the universe and ourselves. For future work short-term, we plan to expand with more exoplanets into the dataset and continue improving our sandbox to be more interactive and accurate.