The count of confirmed exoplanets has just crossed the 5,000 mark, a 30 year journey of discovery led by NASA space telescopes.
We used to live in a universe with only a small number of known planets. More than 5,000 planets are now confirmed to exist beyond our solar system, thanks to a new raft of discoveries.
The planetary odometer turned on March 21 with the addition of 65 new planets outside the solar family. The archive has records of exoplanet discoveries that appear in peer-reviewed, scientific papers and that have been confirmed using multiple detection methods.
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 close proximity to their stars. There are rocky worlds larger than our own and smaller versions of Neptune. Add to that the fact that planets are circling two stars at the same time.
A research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech said that each one of them is a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don't know anything about them.
Our galaxy is likely to hold hundreds of billions of such planets. In 1992 there were strange new worlds around an even stranger star. It was a type of star known as a pulsar, which is a rapidly spinning stellar corpse that emits a lot of radiation. Scientists were able to see planets around the pulsar because of the slight changes in the timing of the pulse.
The first planets to be confirmed outside our solar system were found by finding just three planets around this spinning star.
If you can find planets around a star, they have to be everywhere.
We are opening an era of discovery that will go beyond simply adding new planets to the list, according to Penn State professor and still searches for exoplanets. New exoplanet discoveries have been made by the TESS. Next- generation telescopes and their sensitive instruments will be able to read the atmospheres of exoplanets to see if there are signs of life.
New exoplanet discoveries will be made using a variety of methods with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. A piece of NASA technology aboard the ARIEL mission will help zero in on exoplanet clouds and hazes.
"To my thinking, it is inevitable that we will find some kind of life somewhere, most likely of a primitive kind," he said. The close connection between the chemistry of life on Earth and chemistry found throughout the universe, as well as the detection of widespread organic molecules, suggests that detection of life itself is only a matter of time, he said.
How to find other worlds.
The picture was not always bright. The first planet detected around a sun-like star in 1995 was a hot Jupiter, a gas giant about half the mass of our own Jupiter. A year on this planet lasts four days.
More such planets appeared in the data from ground-based telescopes once they learned to recognize them. They were found using theobble method, which uses slight back-and-forth motions of a star. Nothing looked likely to be a good place to live.
The next big leap in exoplanet-hunting technology is the transit method. William Borucki came up with the idea of attaching extremely sensitive light detectors to a telescope and then launching them into space. The telescope looked at a field of more than 170,000 stars, searching for tiny dips in starlight when a planet crossed a star.
The idea was realized by the telescope.
Borucki says the launch of the mission opened a new window on the universe.
He said that he gets a real feeling of satisfaction and awe at what he sees. It is just amazing.
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