By Ryan Steal
(Source: Your Black Network)
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has revealed that there are now 5,000 known planets beyond our solar system, marking a watershed moment in astronomy — and possibly the quest for extraterrestrial life.
Exoplanets range in size from rocky worlds the size of Earth to gas giants larger than Jupiter to “mini-Neptunes.”
“It’s not just a number,” said Jessie Christiansen, the NASA Exoplanet Archive’s science lead and a research scientist at Caltech’s NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.
Christiansen went on to say that “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about everyone because we don’t know anything about them.”
With an increasing understanding of how to identify planets beyond our solar system and the technological instruments to do so, such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched in 2018 and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, scientists’ potential to find new exoplanets is exploding.
According to NASA, billions of exoplanets are believed to exist in our galaxy. And there’s a chance that the truth about extraterrestrial life is out there.
“To my thinking, it is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere – most likely of some primitive kind,” said Alexander Wolszczan, the main author of a 1992 article that confirmed the discovery of the first exoplanets.
Neptune-like planets, which are similar in size to Neptune or Uranus and can be ice giants or much warmer, account for 35% of the 5,000 planets discovered so far. Around 31% are super-Earths, which range in size from Earth to Neptune and are potentially rocky, while 30% are gas giants.
The “wobble” approach of measuring the minor wobbling of a star produced by the gravitational influences of circling planets led to the discovery of the first exoplanets.
Then they launched a space telescope into orbit, which scanned over 170,000 stars for light dips that would suggest a planet had passed by. The “transit” method is how most exoplanets have been discovered.
When a planet passes between a star and its observer, it is called a transit. When Venus or Mercury pass between us and the Sun, transits inside our solar system can be seen from Earth.
