The NASA Exoplanet Archive Hits 6,000 Planets

From sub-Earth-sized planets to hot Jupiters and everything in between, today’s milestone highlights the rapid growth of exoplanet discoveries and their importance to understanding worlds beyond our own.

Since our 5,000-exoplanet milestone reached in March 2022, the newest 1,000 planets have helped us expand the parameter space of known planets, and dramatically increase the number of planets we can characterize in detail.

To illustrate the former point, this plot shows the distribution of planets in their mass (or minimum mass) and their orbital period. The yellow box highlights one area where the most recent 1,000 planets build on our previous discoveries—cool, giant planets that are analogs to Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system.

These planets have largely been discovered by the radial velocity technique, as the increasing baseline of long, ongoing surveys reaches sensitivity to these distant planets, as well as the direct imaging technique as new instruments come online and search algorithms are refined.

NASA Exoplanet Archive

Astrobiology