Create New History, NASA Has Found 5,000 Exoplanets

NASA's exoplanet discovery has reached 5000 findings. (photo: Doc. NASA/JPL)

JAKARTA - The discovery of planets and alien worlds made by NASA has reached 5000 findings. This fact created a new cosmic milestone that was added to NASA's Exoplanet Archive.

This achievement comes amid recent discoveries and more insights to come. Especially as NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope prepares for planetary-observation operations in space.

"More than 5,000 planets discovered so far include small rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and 'hot Jupiters' in very close orbits around their stars," said NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). ).

"There's a super-Earth, which may be a rocky world larger than ours, and a 'mini-Neptune, a smaller version of our Neptune system. Added to that is a mixture of planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the remnants of our planet. the rest of the debris of dead stars," he added.

NASA's Exoplanet Archive is housed at the California Institute for Technology (Caltech). In order to be added to the catalog, the planets must be independently confirmed by two different methods. For example by detection methods or analytical techniques, the work must also be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Launching Space, Tuesday, March 22, NASA Exoplanet Archive science lead, Jessie Christiansen stated that the world discovered to date is mostly around us, the Solar System.

"Of the 5,000 known exoplanets, 4,900 are located within a few thousand light-years of us. Think about the fact that we are 30,000 light-years from the galactic center. If you estimate from the small bubbles around us, that means there are more planets in our galaxy. that we haven't found, as many as 100 to 200 billion. It's amazing," Christiansen said.

The first confirmed planetary discovery came in 1992, when astronomers Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail, published a paper in the journal Nature. They looked at two worlds orbiting a pulsar, a dead, fast-spinning star, by measuring subtle changes in the timing of the pulsar as light reaches Earth.

However, that world is not as hospitable to life as Earth. It is a hot gas giant that burns its host star in just four Earth days.

Astronomers discover these worlds by watching the gravity-induced wobble or back and forth motion of the star as the planet pulls on it. The larger world is easier to recognize, because it causes a greater wobble.

To find more Earth-sized planets, astronomers at the time needed to try something called the transit method. This method will assess starlight and look for small fluctuations as a planet passes across the surface.

Astronomer William Borucki helped realize that vision as principal investigator of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009 and surpassed its main mission by several years until it finally ran out of fuel in 2018.

Kepler has amassed more than 2,700 planetary discoveries to date, many of them Earth-sized or smaller worlds, and still has a database that results in new discoveries to this day. Many other instruments have joined the hunt for planets since Kepler was launched.