According to NASA, there are now more than 5,000 confirmed planets that stretch beyond our solar system. 65 exoplanets were recently added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive which contributed to this new milestone. The archive contains exoplanet discoveries from peer-reviewed scientific papers.
The planets are confirmed using multiple methods of detection. Jessi Christiansen, the science lead for the archive said “It’s not just a number, … Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about everyone because we don’t know anything about them.” Exoplanets were first discovered in the 1990s making the current times the golden age of exoplanet discovery.
Each exoplanet is very diverse in its own way and represents the population of planets unlike anything found in our solar system. There are rocky worlds larger than Earth called super-Earths. They have found mini-Neptunes bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune and scorching hot Jupiters that dwarf our solar system’s largest planet.
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