NASA has confirmed that there are at least 5,000 known planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, but they are only "a tiny fraction" of all the planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
Among the planets found so far are small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and "hot Jupiters" in scorchingly close orbits around their star, NASA announced on Monday. There are also "super-Earths," which are rocky worlds much bigger than our own, as well as smaller versions of our system's Neptune.
"It’s not just a number," said Jessie Christiansen, a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena. "Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them."
Most exoplanets are found via the transit method, which measures the dimming of a star that happens to have a planet pass in front of it, the Daily Mail reported. The Doppler method is another way to detect exoplanets. This measures the "wobbling" of stars due to the gravitational pull of orbiting planets.
Among the most recently confirmed exoplanets are K2-377 b, a "super-Earth" that has a mass of 3.51 Earths and takes 12.8 days to complete one orbit of its star, and TOI-1064 b, which is a "potentially rocky world larger than Earth," the Daily Mail reported.
According to NASA, the Milky Way alone likely holds "hundreds of billions of such planets." For years they went unnoticed but that all changed in 1992 with the discovery of "strange new worlds orbiting an even stranger star."
"It was a type of neutron star known as a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar corpse that pulses with millisecond bursts of searing radiation," the space agency explained. "Measuring slight changes in the timing of the pulses allowed scientists to reveal planets in orbit around the pulsar."
Finding just three planets around this spinning star essentially opened the floodgates, said Alexander Wolszczan, the lead author on the paper that, 30 years ago, unveiled the first planets to be confirmed outside our solar system.
"If you can find planets around a neutron star, planets have to be basically everywhere," Wolszczan said. "The planet production process has to be very robust."
NASA said its James Webb Space Telescope will capture light from the atmospheres of exoplanets, reading which gases are present to potentially identify tell-tale signs of habitable conditions. The observatory will explore the universe in the infrared spectrum.
"To my thinking, it is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere — most likely of some primitive kind," Wolszczan 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 detection of life itself is only a matter of time, he added.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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