Nasa confirms 5,000 more planets beyond Solar System including rocky Super-Earths

NOT that long ago, in a galaxy nearby, the first exoplanet was discovered.

Today, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been found, archived and will be studied by researchers determined to answer what lies outside our Solar System.

The known exoplanets are in the distant cosmos but we can still learn much about them from light-years away

The latest batch of 65 new confirmations pushed Nasa archives over 5,000 exoplanets with almost 9,000 candidates left to study – that is a lot of world-hunting!

Astronomers have used a clever methodology for locating many of the exoplanets.

While mining for light rays with powerful telescopes, scientists could tell when a planet passed in front of its host star. 

The volume of light would briefly dip from the angle of the observer, which would affirm the exoplanet’s existence in orbit. 

Most exoplanets have been found using this “transit method” and it can provide more insight than just an exoplanet’s location.

Transits can help determine atmospheric composition when light passes through it – scanning for this is one of the tasks assigned to the James Webb Telescope that launched in December.

There is more than just a mathematical likelihood that one of these exoplanets is like Earth – we’ve observed some good contenders. 

Some 31% of the exoplanets are Super-Earths – a term that refers to a planet’s size and means it is larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

Super-Earths have varying compositions with one hot enough to incinerate metals and another that may have oceans covering the entire surface.

A smaller percentage of the observed exoplanets are comparable in size to Earth and might have familiar qualities like rocks and oceans.

This 4% group represents the best chance at finding an Earth-like planet.

Researchers found that Kepler-69c, an exoplanet 2,700 light-years away, is on the edge of its host star’s habitable zone. 

Kepler-69c is closer to its star than Earth is, but that star is only 80% as bright as ours – a potentially compensating factor that could make it capable of supporting life.

CNN quoted Jessie Christiansen, one of the leading exoplanet archivists, as saying “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.”

As we log more and more exoplanets, we have to wonder, have any of them noticed Earth?