SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - Just decades after the first exoplanets were identified, our database of the distant worlds—monitored by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute—has breached a new threshold. Now, astronomers have officially identified more than 6,000 planets outside our solar system.
“This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes—exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters, says in a statement. It also comes just 30 years after researchers confirmed the first exoplanet: a “hot Jupiter” world called 51 Pegasi b, which orbits a star similar to our sun.
No single exoplanet has been logged as the official 6,000th discovery, because scientists around the world add confirmed planets to the list on a rolling basis. Some 8,000 other exoplanet candidates have already been discovered but are still waiting to be officially confirmed and recognized.
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Stephen Kane, a planetary geophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, tells Forbes’ Bruce Dorminey that exoplanets’ most important contribution to planetary science is their vast numbers that allow for a broad range of statistical analyses on mass, size, age and other traits.