“None of us expected this enormous variety of planetary systems and stars. “I get a real feeling of satisfaction, and really of awe at what’s out there,” he said. That idea was realized in the Kepler Space Telescope.īorucki, principal investigator of the now-retired Kepler mission, says its launch in 2009 opened a new window on the universe. The telescope would stare for years at a field of more than 170,000 stars, searching for tiny dips in starlight when a planet crossed a star’s face. Astronomer William Borucki came up with the idea of attaching extremely sensitive light detectors to a telescope, then launching it into space. But still, nothing looked likely to be habitable.įinding small, rocky worlds more like our own required the next big leap in exoplanet-hunting technology: the “transit” method. They were found using the “wobble” method: tracking slight back-and-forth motions of a star, caused by gravitational tugs from orbiting planets. More such planets appeared in the data from ground-based telescopes once astronomers learned to recognize them – first dozens, then hundreds. A year on this planet, in other words, lasts only four days. The first planet detected around a Sun-like star, in 1995, turned out to be a hot Jupiter: a gas giant about half the mass of our own Jupiter in an extremely close, four-day orbit around its star. The picture didn’t always look so bright. The close connection between the chemistry of life on Earth and chemistry found throughout the universe, as well as the detection of widespread organic molecules, suggests detection of life itself is only a matter of time, he added. “To my thinking, it is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere – most likely of some primitive kind,” Wolszczan said. The ESA (European Space Agency) mission ARIEL, launching in 2029, will observe exoplanet atmospheres a piece of NASA technology aboard, called CASE, will help zero in on exoplanet clouds and hazes. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, will make new exoplanet discoveries using a variety of methods. But soon powerful next-generation telescopes and their highly sensitive instruments, starting with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, will capture light from the atmospheres of exoplanets, reading which gases are present to potentially identify tell-tale signs of habitable conditions. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS), launched in 2018, continues to make new exoplanet discoveries. Wolszczan, who still searches for exoplanets as a professor at Penn State, says we’re opening an era of discovery that will go beyond simply adding new planets to the list. “The planet production process has to be very robust.” “If you can find planets around a neutron star, planets have to be basically everywhere,” Wolszczan said. Add to the mix planets orbiting two stars at once and planets stubbornly orbiting the collapsed remnants of dead stars.įinding just three planets around this spinning star essentially opened the floodgates, said Alexander Wolszczan, the lead author on the paper that, 30 years ago, unveiled the first planets to be confirmed outside our solar system. There are “super-Earths,” which are possible rocky worlds bigger than our own, and “mini-Neptunes,” smaller versions of our system’s Neptune. The 5,000-plus planets found so far include small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and “hot Jupiters” in scorchingly close orbits around their stars. The archive records exoplanet discoveries that appear in peer-reviewed, scientific papers, and that have been confirmed using multiple detection methods or by analytical techniques. The planetary odometer turned on March 21, with the latest batch of 65 exoplanets – planets outside our immediate solar family – added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. But a new raft of discoveries marks a scientific high point: More than 5,000 planets are now confirmed to exist beyond our solar system. Not so long ago, we lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun.
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