A staggering number of rockets, according to NASA. Photo: AFP
NASA has announced that there are more than 5,000 confirmed planets beyond our solar system. The latest addition of 65 exoplanets to the Archives of the US Space Agency contributed to the scientific milestone.
The archive is the home of the discoveries of exoplanets of peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been confirmed using multiple methods to detect planets.
“It’s not just a number,” said Jessie Christiansen, scientific director of the archive and a researcher at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the Institute of Technology California in Pasadena.
Artist’s impression of the exoplanet K2-18b (Amanda Smith).
a new world
“Each of them is a new world, a completely new planet“He added in a statement.” I’m thrilled with each of them because we don’t know anything about them. “The scientist assured us that we are currently living in a golden age of the discovery of exoplanets.
Although the existence of planets outside our solar system had previously been proposed, only these worlds they were first discovered in the 1990s.
The diversity of exoplanets represents populations of planets other than anything found in our solar system. They include rocky worlds larger than Earth called super-Earths.
Scientists have also discovered planets orbiting more than one star and even some around the remains of called dead stars white dwarfs.
Next Centaurs. It is a small reddish star that belongs to the largest population of stars in the Galaxy: the red dwarfs.
So far, of the confirmed exoplanets, 30% are gas giants, 31% are super-Earths, and 35% are Neptune-like. Only 4% are terrestrial or rocky planets such as Earth or Mars.
Previous discoveries of exoplanets have been made thanks to telescopes and satellites for hunting planets such as the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
When Christiansen was a graduate student in the early 2000s, there were only about 100 known exoplanets.
“This is part of why I wanted to get into the field, because it was new and very exciting for people to find planets around other stars,” Christiansen revealed.
“My colleague David Ciardi (chief scientist at NASA Exoplanet Archive) pointed out the other day that half of the people alive have never lived in a world where we didn’t know about exoplanets,” he added.
Kepler helped scientists discover about two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed planets, Christiansen said.
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Source: Clarin
