Pasadena (dpa) – About 30 years after the first discovery of an exoplanet, NASA has now recorded more than 5,000 samples.
Recently, NASA announced that a group of 65 of these celestial bodies have been officially recognized and the threshold of 5,000 exoplanets has been crossed.
“It’s not just a number,” said Jesse Christiansen, chief scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Archives. “Each of these exoplanets is a new world, a whole new planet. I get excited every time because we don’t know anything about exoplanets yet.”
The first exoplanets were only discovered in the 1990s
For a long time, astronomers only knew about the planets revolving around our sun. The first exoplanets – celestial bodies that usually orbit a star outside our solar system – were only confirmed in the early 1990s. NASA experts assume that there are hundreds of billions of exoplanets in our Milky Way.
Previously known exoplanets differ greatly in shape and composition. Experts divide celestial bodies into different classes, including gas giants, super-Earths and small Neptune.
Time and time again, the discovery of exoplanets in the so-called habitable zone is causing an uproar. This is the name given to the region around the star where temperatures allow liquid water to exist on the planet. Liquid water is essential to life as we know it.
In the coming years, more telescopes will be launched into space to find and study exoplanets. “In my opinion, it is inevitable that we will find some form of life somewhere, probably in a very primitive form,” said Alexander Wallachian, who helped discover the first three exoplanets 30 years ago.
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