NASA CONFIRMS THE EXISTENCE OF MORE THAN 5 THOUSAND PLANETS OUTSIDE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

After a ‘cosmic milestone’, NASA adds more than 5 thousand planets outside the Solar System in its official records.
The list of exoplanets discovered by humans does not stop growing. This week, NASA added 65 extrasolar planets to its exoplanet archive, adding more than 5,000 confirmed objects located beyond the confines of our galaxy. This is what we know.

NASA confirms 5 thousand planets outside the Solar System in its records

After almost 30 years of observations, NASA scientists have managed to confirm the existence of more than 5,000 planets outside our solar system.

That record was broken after a recent study added 65 exoplanets to NASA’s exoplanet archive. These discoveries have been described as “cosmic milestones.”

“Each of them is a new world, a new planet. I get excited about each one because we don’t know anything about them,” Jessie Christiansen, the Archive’s scientific director and a researcher at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, said in a statement.

What are extrasolar planets like?

A body whose orbit does not belong to our Solar System is known as an extrasolar planet or exoplanet.

Identification of these extrasolar planets began in 1992, when several Earth-mass planets in the constellation Virgo were discovered orbiting the Lich pulsar. The first exoplanet confirmed by the space agency was Dimidius, an object more massive than Jupiter discovered in 1995 by astronomers Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz.

As detailed by NASA, the 5,000 planets registered in its files include “small rocky worlds like Earth”, “gas giants many times larger than Jupiter”, “rocky worlds potentially larger than Earth” and “a version smaller than Neptune”.