Posted on 09/17/2025 1:08:57 PM PDT by Red Badger
VIDEO AT LINK................
It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found.
The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the 6,000th entry. The number is monitored by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), based at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California. There are more than 8,000 additional candidate planets awaiting confirmation, with NASA leading the world in searching for life in the universe.
See NASA’s Exoplanet Discoveries Dashboard
“This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes — exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Step by step, from discovery to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question: Are we alone? Now, with our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory, America will lead the next giant leap — studying worlds like our own around stars like our Sun. This is American ingenuity, and a promise of discovery that unites us all.”
An artist's concept showing a grid of dozens of diverse exoplanets against a dark background. The planets vary in color, size, and texture, illustrating the vast variety of worlds discovered beyond our solar system.
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. Most can be studied only indirectly, but scientists know they vary widely, as depicted in this artist’s concept, from small, rocky worlds and gas giants to water-rich planets and those as hot as stars. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered around a star similar to our Sun, in 1995. (Prior to that, a few planets had been identified around stars that had burned all their fuel and collapsed.) Although researchers think there are billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, finding them remains a challenge. In addition to discovering many individual planets with fascinating characteristics as the total number of known exoplanets climbs, scientists are able to see how the general planet population compares to the planets of our own solar system.
For example, while our solar system hosts an equal number of rocky and giant planets, rocky planets appear to be more common in the universe. Researchers have also found a range of planets entirely different from those in our solar system. There are Jupiter-size planets that orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun; planets that orbit two stars, no stars, and dead stars; planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemstones.
“Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them,” said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), located at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If we want to find out if we’re alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential.”
Searching for other worlds
Fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged, because most planets are so faint they get lost in the light from their parent star. The other four methods of planet detection are indirect. With the transit method, for instance, astronomers look for a star to dim for a short period as an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
To account for the possibility that something other than an exoplanet is responsible for a particular signal, most exoplanet candidates must be confirmed by follow-up observations, often using an additional telescope, and that takes time. That’s why there is a long list of candidates in the NASA Exoplanet Archive (hosted by NExScI) waiting to be confirmed.
“We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates,” said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. “A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets.”
The rate of exoplanet discoveries has accelerated in recent years (the database reached 5,000 confirmed exoplanets just three years ago), and this trend seems likely to continue. Kesseli and her colleagues anticipate receiving thousands of additional exoplanet candidates from the ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia mission, which finds planets through a technique called astrometry, and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will discover thousands of new exoplanets primarily through a technique called gravitational microlensing.
An infographic titled "Exoplanet Missions" showing space telescopes and ground observatories used to find exoplanets. Missions like Hubble, JWST, and TESS are grouped into categories such as NASA Missions, ESA Partner Missions, and Ground Telescopes.
Many telescopes contribute to the search for and study of exoplanets, including some in space (artists concepts shown here) and on the ground. Doing the work are organizations around the world, including ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and NSF (National Science Foundation). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Future exoplanets
At NASA, the future of exoplanet science will emphasize finding rocky planets similar to Earth and studying their atmospheres for biosignatures — any characteristic, element, molecule, substance, or feature that can be used as evidence of past or present life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has already analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres.
But studying the atmospheres of planets the size and temperature of Earth will require new technology. Specifically, scientists need better tools to block the glare of the star a planet orbits. And in the case of an Earth-like planet, the glare would be significant: The Sun is about 10 billion times brighter than Earth — which would be more than enough to drown out our home planet’s light if viewed by a distant observer.
NASA has two main initiatives to try overcoming this hurdle. The Roman telescope will carry a technology demonstration instrument called the Roman Coronagraph that will test new technologies for blocking starlight and making faint planets visible. At its peak performance, the coronagraph should be able to directly image a planet the size and temperature of Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun, and at a similar distance from that star. With its microlensing survey and coronagraphic observations, Roman will reveal new details about the diversity of planetary systems, showing how common solar systems like our own may be across the galaxy.
Additional advances in coronagraph technology will be needed to build a coronagraph that can detect a planet like Earth. NASA is working on a concept for such a mission, currently named the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
More about ExEP, NExScI NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program is responsible for implementing the agency’s plans for the discovery and understanding of planetary systems around nearby stars. It acts as a focal point for exoplanet science and technology and integrates cohesive strategies for future discoveries. The science operations and analysis center for ExEP is NExScI, based at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
I also think the onboard culture would become self destructive.
There is no doubt of that... The problem is this... There are over 7 million animal species on earth today and we can’t communicate with any of them... Not one other species other than our own... And while there are likely lots of different life forms out there... We won’t be able to communicate with them either and we will never travel at the speed of light before our own species is extinct.
So I hate to burst the bubbles of those who believe that humans can exist in a universe similar to that in science fiction genres such as Star Trek and Star Wars... But that’s never going to happen. We are self aware and understand that we have a creator... Not one other species that we have come across so far knows that same truth... And it is very unlikely that any other species will ever know that truth.
Never is a long time. I don't think you should be so sure.
Which ones belong to the Vulcans and Klingons and Romulans and Organians and Gorn and Cardassians and the Orion green women planet?...
“We are alone... God created us and then he broke the mold.”
I think that God created more than one Earth-like planet but then over time them other planets got destroyed by their parent star and now we’re all alone.
That’s what I think. What do you think? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Habitable...”
Doesn’t habitable mean livable?
That’s the analogy I use. This is like one Wal-Mart, but there are quadrillions of them. And I like to follow up everything the bible tells us about the earth with, “as far as you’re concerned.
i.e. as far as we’re concerned, this is the only planet. It’s the only one that concerns us. We are his caretakers of this particular one.
I think this age will be remembered as “The Collapse of Western Civilization”.
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Definitely Western Europe is headed for some sort of civil war.
The biggest explosion will be in france.
There is a massive about face currently in motion in the USA.
There comes a moment when things crystalize. Its happening how.
The speed of the reversal of trends for the last 20-50 years is excellerating.
It is the vast change in the USA that is starting to set off the change in Europe.
Agree that if you look out the side windows of the moving car—the landscape looks bad.
But the front shows a different story.
Was it really necessary to distinguish the intra-solar system 8 from the extra-solar system 6000?
Not so fast...There are moons out there with oceans underneath ice. We have no idea if life is there or not. If it turns out it is that gives life plenty of opportunity to exist all over the universe.
People aren’t thinking about what will happen generations on when each successive generation has to be raised with no choice but to live in a box and be a crewman in an intergalactic space ship. It won’t be pretty.
Not only that, in order to have sufficient genetic diversity to colonize another planet they’ll have to send along tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of genetically-screened frozen embryos (because that’s more compact and less resource-intensive than tens of thousands of genetically-selected mated couples).
The crew will need to be all women because frozen embryos only need a mother, so economy of space and resources will require an all woman-crew. Can’t spare the resources for the XY crowd because the only thing the XX crowd can’t do has already been provided for, and letting romance muck up the equation would be out of the question. So not only will you have no choice but to be a crewman on a spaceship, you also will be required to be a surrogate mother and give birth to your own replacement on the ship’s crew.
And when they arrive at the new planet, they will need to be all women settlers (at first) because their prime directive will be to give birth to as many embryos as possible of both sexes. Even considering geometric population expansion, it will take several generations before all of those tens of thousands of embryos can be given birth to, which will be necessary to make all that stored genetic diversity available in the settler’s gene pool, which will be a requirement for a sustainable population.
So it will be still more generations after arrival that all women will be required to be serial surrogate mothers.
And after all that, a bunch of women who haven’t seen a man in thousands of years will be raising the new planet’s first boys. Who will be there to teach them to hunt and fish and change the oil in the car and leave the toilet seat up?
If you think a journey like this would be an interstellar love boat, you haven’t considered the nuts-and-bolts realities of what it would take to create a sustainable population on a planet a hundred thousand light years away.
No. Why embark on a trip you will never see the end of..................
I think such a trip would be a lot of misery.
I’ve read several sci-fi novels that have this as their setting.
Usually it ends in a mutiny or worse.
One novel had the inhabitants in two groups that were at war with each other for generations and generations and neither side knew they were on a spaceship, it had no windows. The spaceship was their ‘universe’.
Another story had the inhabitants rebelling against a dictator and his cronies that did not want the trip to ever end..................
And these ships were ten miles long and a couple of miles wide.......................
And these ships were ten miles long and a couple of miles wide.......................
That sort of thing would work only if the people were kept in some sort of suspended animation for the entire time. That leads into the recent movie "Passengers". (A man woke up too early)
I love that movie!...................
The search for chocolate on other planets would be worthwhile only if was superior to what we have. And the logistics of getting it to earth would be incredibly difficult and time consuming. So I guess we just need to appreciate what we already have.
hey ms confirmation bias, this research is rapidly reaching an exponential phase where we can extrapolate maths , planets in the DrakeZone posited against M-Class stars and pretty much demonstrate carbon-based life existed/exists elsewhere — in the Milky Way alone, or even just one planet over. Then drill-down — which are the best Eden candidates for sentient life.
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