Loading…
21
Found out 2,000+ exoplanets confirmed in 30 years and that's just a dot of sky
I was googling space facts during a slow shift and the NASA exoplanet archive shows over 5,500 confirmed worlds, and the first one around a sun-like star was only found in 1995, which makes me think we have barely looked - if we only checked a tiny slice of sky so far, what's your best guess for how many are actually out there?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
susansingh25d ago
Wow, that number gets me every time too. The way I figure it, the Milky Way alone probably has hundreds of billions of planets when you count the ones around red dwarfs and rogue worlds floating free without any star at all. We only spot the easy ones right now, the big ones close to their stars or ones that happen to cross in front of them from our view. So my honest guess is the real count is in the trillions just in our galaxy, and we have checked maybe a grain of sand on a whole beach. The fun part is the tech keeps getting better, so the next 30 years should blow this number wide open.
1