![]() I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them.” “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. “It’s not just a number,” said Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena. The cones of exoplanet discovery radiate out from planet Earth, like spokes on a wheel. That’s just a fraction of the likely hundreds of billions in our galaxy. Add to the mix planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the collapsed remnants of dead stars.Īstronomers have now confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system. There are “super-Earths,” which are possible rocky worlds bigger than our own, and “mini-Neptunes,” smaller versions of our system’s Neptune. ![]() The 5,000-plus planets found so far include small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and “hot Jupiters” in scorchingly close orbits around their stars. The archive records exoplanet discoveries that appear in peer-reviewed, scientific papers, and that have been confirmed using multiple detection methods or by analytical techniques. The planetary odometer turned on March 21, with the latest batch of 65 exoplanets – planets outside our immediate solar family – added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. But a new raft of discoveries marks a scientific high point: More than 5,000 planets are now confirmed to exist beyond our solar system. Not so long ago, we lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun. ![]() The count of confirmed exoplanets just ticked past the 5,000 mark, representing a 30-year journey of discovery led by NASA space telescopes. As of 2022, the tally stands at just over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s. What do planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, look like? A variety of possibilities are shown in this illustration.
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