(You can only see incomplete orbits in the video. NASA’s astrobiology blog explains that it would take 40 years’ worth of observations to see even one planet in this image complete a full orbit.)

It’s also a rare image: Astronomers usually only observe exoplanets through indirect means. Most often astronomers look at stars dimming slightly to infer that a planet has passed in between that star and the Earth. When these planets were discovered in 2008, they were among the first exoplanets to be observed directly with a telescope.

“Astronomers have made videos of exoplanets orbiting before, but usually they've done it by blinking frames, so you'd see the planet jump around in its orbit,” Jason Wang, an astronomy student at UC Berkeley who had a hand in creating the video, says. Here, Wang has smoothed the motion between the frames to show the planets moving in fluid motion, “to bring it to life,” he says.