NASA confirms there are 5,000 exoplanets outside our solar system: each a ‘new world’

Collect them all. NASA JPL announces an astronomical achievement Monday with the confirmed discovery of more than 5,000 exoplanets. A new batch of 65 planets outside our solar system have joined NASA’s Exoplanet Archivesparking a festive mood.

“It’s not just a number,” says Exoplanet Archive Jesse Christiansen said in a statement. “Each one of them is a new world, a whole new planet. I’m excited for each one because we don’t know anything about them.”

The existence of the first exoplanets was confirmed in the early 1990s, which means that we set an impressive pace for discovery. NASA announced The number of planets reached 4000 In June 2019 it took less than three years to add another thousand to that amount.

We can thank the hard work of the researchers and the data collected by expeditions such as retired now kepler space telescope and running current Transiting a satellite to survey the outer planets (Tis) to find all these distant planets.

Scientists don’t just search for exoplanets for fun (though they are fun). They are also looking for signs that some planets may be habitable. Recently launched James Webb Space Telescope It is expected to tell us a lot about the exoplanets and their atmospheres.

Astronomer Alexander Wallachian, lead author of the book Penetration study on the first confirmed exoplanets Three decades ago.

We haven’t conclusively found a clone of Earth yet, but the exoplanets observed so far range from rocky worlds like ours to gigantic gas giants larger than Jupiter. While 5,000 is an impressive number, it’s only a small piece of what’s out there. NASA said, “We know this: Our galaxy probably contains hundreds of billions of these planets.”