There are only a few hundred billion planets left to find in the Milky Way.
The exoplanet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system, in an artist's impression.NASA has officially confirmed the existence of more than 5,000 exoplanets—planets that exist outside our solar system—as of Monday. A new batch of 65 confirmations pushed the tally up to 5,005 on the agency’sThe 5,000-plus alien worlds are diverse. Some are small and rocky. Others are gas giants that dwarf Jupiter.
Five thousand is “not just a number,” Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the exoplanet archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena, said in. “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them.”
Exoplanet discovery was, for a while, limited by the technology we have on Earth—we can only peer so far into the cosmos from our own rocky planet, and Earth’s atmosphere can interfere with readings. The advent of telescopes launched into space dramatically increased our exoplanet detection capabilities. And with even greater advancements in science, and new observatories like the“Of the 5,000 exoplanets known, 4,900 are located within a few thousand light-years of us,” Christiansen said in a.
“Now, exoplanets are almost ordinary,” Christiansen told Caltech. “My colleague David Ciardi [chief scientist for the NASA Exoplanet Archive] pointed out the other day that half of the people alive have never lived in a world where we didn’t know about exoplanets.” But there’s still much more to learn and discover, Christiansen said. “Now that we have enough planets, we can really slice and dice and ask how different kinds of planets are made,” or how the different ages of stars affect their orbiting planets. “The more planets we have,” she added, “the more answers we have.”Hannah Seo is a science contributor at Popular Science. She started as an intern in 2020 and has since regularly contributed to both Popular Science’s website and quarterly magazine.
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