NASA confirms 5,000 exoplanets beyond Solar System

PanARMENIAN.Net - NASA JPL announced a cosmic milestone on Monday, March 21, with the confirmed discovery of more than 5,000 exoplanets. A new batch of 65 planets located outside our solar system joined the NASA Exoplanet Archive, triggering a celebratory mood, CNet reports.

"It's not just a number," Exoplanet Archive science lead Jessie Christiansen said in a statement. "Each one of them is a new world, a brand new planet. I get excited about every one because we don't know anything about them."

The first exoplanets were confirmed in the early 1990s, which means humanity gas set an impressive pace for discovery. NASA announced the planet count had hit 4,000 in June 2019 and it took less than three years to add another thousand to that haul.

Scientists aren't just looking for exoplanets for the fun of it (though it is fun). They're also looking for signs some of the planets might be habitable. The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope is expected to reveal a lot more about exoplanets and their atmospheres.

"To my thinking, it is inevitable that we'll find some kind of life somewhere -- most likely of some primitive kind," said astronomer Alexander Wolszczan, lead author of the breakthrough study on the first confirmed exoplanets from three decades ago.