Washington, The latest addition of 65 exoplanets to the NASA Exoplanet Archive contributed to the scientific milestone.
This archive is the home to exoplanet discoveries from peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been confirmed using multiple methods of detecting the planets.
“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 the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in a statement. “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.”
A variety of exoplanet types can be seen in this illustration. Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s.
We’re currently living in a golden age of exoplanet discovery. Although the existence of planets outside of our solar system had been previously proposed and certainly depicted in science fiction.
The diversity of exoplanets represent populations of planets unlike anything found in our solar system. They include rocky worlds larger than Earth called super-Earths, mini-Neptunes bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and scorching hot Jupiters that dwarf our solar system’s largest planet and closely orbit their host stars.
Scientists have also found planets that orbit more than one star and even some around the remnants of dead stars called white dwarfs.
So far, of the confirmed exoplanets, 30% are gas giants, 31% are super-Earths, and 35% are Neptune-like. Just 4% are terrestrial, or rocky planets like Earth or Mars.
Previous exoplanet discoveries have been made thanks to planet-hunting telescopes and satellites like the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
New telescopes will only increase the potential for exoplanet discovery. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December, will be able to peer through the atmospheres of exoplanets.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in 2027 and aid in the search for exoplanets with a variety of techniques. The European Space Agency’s ARIEL mission, launching in 2029, will study exoplanet atmospheres.
Although scientists have confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, there are likely hundreds of billions of them across the Milky Way galaxy, the CNN reported.
Source: Oman News Agency