Three decades after it began, the exoplanet revolution shows no sign of slowing down
Astronomers have added the 5,000th alien world to the NASA Exoplanet Archive, officials with the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California announced on Monday .
"There are ‘super-Earths,’ which are possible rocky worlds bigger than our own, and ‘mini-Neptunes,’ smaller versions of our system’s Neptune," JPL officials added. "Add to the mix planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the collapsed remnants of dead stars." "Of the 5,000 exoplanets known, 4,900 are located within a few thousand light-years of us," Christiansen added. "And think about the fact that we’re 30,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy; if you extrapolate from the little bubble around us, that means there are many more planets in our galaxy we haven’t found yet, as many as 100 to 200 billion. It’s mind-blowing."
Astronomers found these worlds by spotting wobbles of stars as planets tugged upon them. Larger worlds were easier to spot, as they induced bigger wobbles. To find more Earth-sized planets, astronomers said at the time, they would need to try something called the "transit" method. That would assess the light of a star and look for tiny fluctuations as a planet passed across the face.
By 2011 , HARPS had discovered more than 150 exoplanets. While access has been restricted periodically in latter years due to the coronavirus pandemic, HARPS remains operational and continues to seek new worlds with high precision.
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