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NASA confirms existence of 5,000 exoplanets

2022-03-22T19:09:42.404Z


The latest addition of 65 exoplanets to NASA's Exoplanet Archive contributed to the scientific milestone marked Monday.


How many planets are there outside our solar system?

1:26

(CNN) -- 

There are now more than 5,000 confirmed planets beyond our solar system, according to NASA.

The latest addition of 65 exoplanets to NASA's Exoplanet Archive contributed to the scientific milestone marked Monday.


This archive houses exoplanet discoveries from peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been confirmed by multiple planet detection methods.

  • Meet the Earth-like exoplanets that the James Webb telescope will study closely

"It's not just a number," Jessie Christiansen, chief science officer for the archive and a researcher at NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

"Each one of them is a new world, a whole new planet. I get excited about each 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 are currently living a golden age in the discovery of exoplanets.

Although the existence of planets outside our solar system had been previously proposed and certainly depicted in science fiction, these worlds were not discovered until the 1990s.

Exoplanets have a diversity of characteristics

Exoplanet diversity represents populations 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, scorching Jupiters that dwarf the largest planet in our solar system and orbit closely around their host stars.

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Scientists also found planets orbiting more than one star and even some around the remnants of dead stars called white dwarfs.

So far, 30% of confirmed exoplanets are gas giants, 31% are super-Earths, and 35% are Neptune-like.

Only 4% are terrestrial or rocky planets, like Earth or Mars.

Previous exoplanet discoveries have been made by planet-hunting telescopes and satellites, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Kepler Space Telescope, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

When Christiansen was a graduate student in the early 2000s, only about 100 exoplanets were known.

"That's part of why I wanted to go into this field, because it was something new and very exciting to find planets around other stars," Christiansen said in a Q&A session shared by Caltech.

"Now, exoplanets are almost ordinary.

My colleague David Ciardi (chief scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Archive) pointed out the other day that half the people alive have never lived in a world where we didn't know about exoplanets."

Kepler helped scientists discover about two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed planets, Christiansen said.

In the new batch of 65 planets, many are super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets, along with some hot Jupiter-sized planets.

There are also two Earth-size planets, but they're about 620 degrees Fahrenheit (327 degrees Celsius), so they're more "hot rocks" than habitable planets, Christiansen said.

He also noted that one of them is a system with five planets orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star, not unlike the TRAPPIST-1 system, where a similar star hosts seven rocky planets.

  • The Belgrano ll base in Antarctica already has its dome to observe exoplanets

Space observatories join the hunt

The new telescopes will only increase the potential for discovering exoplanets.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December, will be able to observe the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The Webb telescope is set to study the TRAPPIST system in detail.

Watch the incredible capture of starlight by the Webb telescope 0:50

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in 2027 and will help the search for exoplanets with various techniques.

The European Space Agency's ARIEL mission, due to launch in 2029, will study the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Although scientists have confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, there are likely hundreds of billions of them in the entire Milky Way.

“Of the 5,000 known exoplanets, 4,900 are within a few thousand light-years of us, Christiansen said. “And let's think we're 30,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy;

if we extrapolate from the little bubble around us, that means there are many more planets in our galaxy that we haven't found yet, up to 100 or 200 billion.

It's amazing."

exoplanets

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-03-22

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