![]() ![]() But soon powerful next-generation telescopes and their highly sensitive instruments, starting with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, will capture light from the atmospheres of exoplanets, reading which gases are present to potentially identify tell-tale signs of habitable conditions. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS), launched in 2018, continues to make new exoplanet discoveries. Wolszczan, who still searches for exoplanets as a professor at Penn State, says we’re opening an era of discovery that will go beyond simply adding new planets to the list. “The planet production process has to be very robust.” “If you can find planets around a neutron star, planets have to be basically everywhere,” Wolszczan said. Add to the mix planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the collapsed remnants of dead stars.įinding just three planets around this spinning star essentially opened the floodgates, said Alexander Wolszczan, the lead author on the paper that, 30 years ago, unveiled the first planets to be confirmed outside 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.
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