(CNN) – According to NASA, there are now more than 5,000 confirmed planets beyond our solar system.
The recent addition of 65 exoplanets to NASA’s Exoplanet archive contributed to the scientific milestone marked on Monday.
This archive contains extraterrestrial findings from co-reviewed scientific articles confirmed by several planetary detection methods.
“It’s not just numbers,” said Jesse Christiansson, the archive’s chief science officer and researcher at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Everyone has a new world, a new planet. I’m excited about each one because we know nothing about them.”
You can see the different types of exoplanet in this chart. Scientists first discovered extraterrestrials in the 1990s.
We are currently living in the golden age of the discovery of exoplanets. Although the existence of planets outside our solar system was previously proposed and certainly depicted in science fiction, these worlds were not discovered until the 1990s.
Exoplanets have a variety of characteristics
Exoplanet diversity refers to the population of planets unlike anything found in our solar system. Among them are rocky worlds larger than Earth, called Super Earths, sub-Neptunes larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune and hot, burning Jupiter orbiting the largest planet in our solar system, the dwarf and their host stars.
Scientists have discovered more than one star orbiting the remains of dead stars known as white dwarfs.
So far, 30% of confirmed asteroids are gas giants, 31% are super-Earths and 35% are Neptune. Only 4% of terrestrial or rocky planets such as Earth or Mars.
Previous discoveries of extraterrestrials have been made using telescopes and satellites that hunt planets. Spitzer Space TelescopeThe Kepler space telescope And this Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
When Christiansson was a graduate student in the early 2000s, only about 100 exoplanets were known.
“That’s part of why I wanted to get into this field because having planets around other stars is a new and very exciting thing,” Christian said in an interview. Question and answer session shared by Caltech. “Now, extraterrestrials are almost normal.
My colleague David Ciardi (Principal Scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Archive) pointed out the other day that half the living people never lived in a world we did not know about the Exoplanets.
Kepler helped scientists discover two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed planets, Christiansen said.
The new set of 65 planets includes several super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets, as well as some hot Jupiter-sized planets.
There are two planets the size of Earth, but they are about 620 degrees Fahrenheit (327 degrees Celsius), so they are “hotter rocks” than the habitable planets, Christiansen said.
One of them, unlike the TRAPPIST-1 system, is a five-planet system orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star, similar to the seven galaxies.
Space labs join the hunt
New telescopes will only increase their ability to detect exoplanets. Launched in December, the James Webb Space Telescope can be observed Atmospheres of extraterrestrials.
The Webb Telescope is set up to study the TRAPPIST system in detail.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope It will be launched in 2027 and will help search for extraterrestrials with various techniques. The European Space Agency’s ARIEL mission, to be launched in 2029, will explore extraterrestrial atmospheres.
Although scientists have confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, there may be hundreds of billions in the entire Milky Way.
“Of the 5,000 known exoplanets, 4,900 are within a few thousand light years of us,” Christiansen said. If we separate from the tiny bubble around us, there are many more planets in our galaxy, up to 100 or 200 billion. It’s amazing. ”
