After 30 years of peering into space through the eyes of NASA telescopes, the space agency has announced that there are a confirmed 5,000 planets beyond our solar system.
NASA shared in its release that the 5,000 contains a variety of planets, including rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants larger than Jupiter, and "hot Jupiters" in scorchingly close orbits to their stars.
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"There are 'super-Earths,' which are possible rocky worlds bigger than our own, and 'mini-Neptunes,' smaller versions of our system's Neptune," the release said, adding that they have also found planets orbiting two stars at once.
NASA shared the news in a press release, adding that "Not so long ago, we lived in a universe with only a small number of known planets, all of them orbiting our Sun."
The space agency crossed the 5,000 mark on March 21, with the addition of 65 exoplanets discovered outside our immediate "solar family," NASA shared in the release.
The first 'new' planet discovered by NASA was in 1992 when they found a planet orbiting a neutron sun known as a pulsar.
Now, each of the 5,000 plus planets that have been discovered have been added to the exoplanet archive. The planets are only considered official when the discoveries appear in peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been confirmed using multiple detection methods, NASA said.
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Jessie Christiansen, a science lead for the archive and a NASA Exoplanet Science Institute research scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, shared that this milestone is more than "just a number."
"Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet," Christiansen said in the release. "I get excited about every one because we don't know anything about them."
While it is a milestone to confirm the 5,000 exoplanets, NASA shared that the number is only a fraction of the likely hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone.
Alexander Wolszczan, a professor at Penn State, was the first to discover the exoplanet in 1992 and his paper from 30 years ago opened the floodgates to confirming more planets outside our solar system.
"If you can find planets around a neutron star, planets have to be basically everywhere," Wolszczan said. "The planet production process has to be very robust."
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