NASA’s exoplanet count tops 5,000

Mar 26,2022: NASA declared that he number of confirmed exoplanets has just exceeded the 5,000 mark.The first planet to orbit a star outside our solar system was discovered on 21 Mar In 1995, almost 30 years back. The account is held by NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, which records the discoveries of these bodies that appear in peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been confirmed by multiple detection methods or analytical techniques. The “planetary odometer” surpassed 5,000 today thanks to the latest batch of 65 exoplanets added to the NASA archive. The first planet detected in a Sun-like star, in 1995, was 51 Pegasi b, located 50 light-years from Earth. It is a gas giant with half the mass of Jupiter in an extremely close orbit to its star, so its year lasts only four days. The people responsible for the discovery were the Swiss Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who in 2019 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contribution to the understanding of the evolution of the universe and the place of the Earth in the cosmos The more than 5,000 planets found so far include small rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and “hot Jupiter” in scorchingly close orbits around their stars, NASA recalled. There are also so-called “Super-Earths”, which are possible rocky worlds larger than ours, and “mini-Neptunes”, as well as planets that orbit around two stars at once and others that continue to circle collapsed remains of dead stars. “It’s not just a number”, according to the scientific director of the archive and researcher at the NASA Institute of Exoplanet Sciences, Jessie Christiansen, because “each of them is a new world, a totally new planet” that he knows nothing about.