NASA is on a roll. The space agency announced Tuesday it has officially discovered its 5,000th exoplanet or celestial body that resides elsewhere outside our solar system. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory added 65 more planets to the NASA Exoplanet Archive on Tuesday, officially taking the total past 5,000 since the agency began keeping track some 30 years ago.
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The exoplanets discovered range anywhere from smaller, rocky worlds like the planet we reside on to massive gas giants that even dwarf Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Then there’s the TRAPPIST-1 system, which is home to at least seven planets that all reside within the star’s habitable zone…and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
“It’s not just a number,” says Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the archive and 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.”
The exoplanets have been discovered using data captured by NASA’s stable of telescopes. While we’ve discovered just 5,000 using the telescopes, scientists insist that’s just the smallest fraction of planets in our galaxy, let alone the entire universe.
“If you can find planets around a neutron star, planets have to be basically everywhere,” researcher Alexander Wolszczan adds. “The planet production process has to be very robust.”
“To my thinking, it is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere – most likely of some primitive kind,” Wolszczan says. 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.
Now that NASA and the ESA are ready to launch the James Webb Telescope later this year, scientists are hoping for an entirely new era in the exploration of space.
