NASA confirms there are more than 5,000 planets outside the solar system

With 65 extrasolar planet newly added, NASA information marks a new milestone for the archive exoplanets. This repository is home to extrasolar exoplanet discoveries from peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been validated using a variety of planet detection methods.

“It’s not just a number,” Jessie Christiansen, the archive’s chief science officer and a NASA Exoplanet Science Institute research scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement. declare. “Each of these planets is a new world, a whole new planet.”

There are many types of exoplanets. Scientists discovered the first extrasolar planets in the 1990s.

We are currently living in the golden age of extrasolar planet discovery. Although the existence of planets beyond our own solar system has been suggested before and certainly described in science fiction, these worlds were only first discovered in the 1990s.

The diversity of extrasolar planets represents planetary populations unlike anything found in our own solar system. These include rocky worlds larger than Earth known as super-Earths, small Neptune types larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and scorching hot Jupiters, the largest planet in the solar system. and orbit their host stars.

The illustration shows seven TRAPPIST planets, all roughly the size of Earth. (Photo: NASA)

Scientists have also found planets orbiting many stars and even some planets around the remains of dead stars known as white dwarfs.

Of the confirmed exoplanets to date, 30% are gas giants, 31% are super-Earths, and 35% are Neptune-like. Only 4% are terrestrial planets, or as rocky as Earth or Mars.

Previous exoplanet discoveries have been made by planet-hunting telescopes and satellites such as the Spitzer space telescope, the Kepler space telescope, and the exoplanet survey satellite. transitional crystal.

In the early 2000s, only about 100 exoplanets were known.

The Kepler space telescope has helped scientists discover about two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed planets.

Of the 65 new planets, many are super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, along with several hot Jupiter-sized planets. There are also two Earth-sized planets, but their temperatures are around 620 degrees F (327°C), so it’s more of a “hot rock” than a habitable planet.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in 2027 and assist in the search for extrasolar planets using a variety of techniques. The European Space Agency’s ARIEL mission, to be launched in 2029, will study the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

Although scientists have confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, there are likely hundreds of billions of them in the Milky Way. Of the 5,000 known exoplanets, 4,900 are located several thousand light-years away.

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