“It is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere.” Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechNASA announced on Monday that it has added the 5,000th alien world to its Exoplanet Archive marking a big milestone for planetary science.
“The 5,000-plus planets found so far include small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and ‘hot Jupiters’ in scorchingly close orbits around their stars,” officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California said in a statement.
“There are ‘super-Earths,’ which are possible rocky worlds bigger than our own, and ‘mini-Neptunes,’ smaller versions of our system’s Neptune,” JPL officials added. “Add to the mix planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the collapsed remnants of dead stars.”
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is housed at the California Institute for Technology (Caltech). To be added to the catalog, planets must be independently confirmed by two different methods, and the work must be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The first exoplanets were found in the early 1990s. While telescopes on the ground and in space have done well to get the count to 5,000 since then, Jessie Christiansen, science lead of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, stated on Caltech’s website that the worlds found to date are “mostly in this little bubble around our solar system, where they are easier to find.”
