ConfirmsUncategorized NASA Confirms 5,000 Exoplanets Beyond Our Solar System: Each a ‘New World’ – CNET [CNET] March 22, 2022 Amanda Kooser Just hundreds of billions of planets left to go. View Article on CNET Enlarge Image NASA announced the planet count had hit 4,000 in June 2019 and it took less than three years to add another thousand to that haul. We can thank the tireless work of researchers and the data collected by missions like the now retired Kepler Space Telescope and the currently operating Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) for finding all these distant planets. Scientists aren’t just looking for exoplanets for the fun of it (though it is fun). They’re also looking for signs some of the planets might be habitable. The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope is expected to tell us a lot more about exoplanets and their atmospheres. “To my thinking, it is inevitable that we’ll find some kind of life somewhere — most likely of some primitive kind,” said astronomer Alexander Wolszczan, lead author of the breakthrough study on the first confirmed exoplanets from three decades ago. We haven’t definitively found an Earth clone yet, but the exoplanets spotted so far range from rocky worlds like ours to jumbo gas giants bigger than Jupiter. While 5,000 is an impressive number, it’s just a tiny sliver of what’s out there. Said NASA, “We do know this: Our galaxy likely holds hundreds of billions of such planets.” Get the CNET Now newsletter Spice up your small talk with the latest tech news, products and reviews. Delivered on weekdays. Spread the word!Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) The Best Fantasy TV Shows on Netflix – CNET [CNET] NASA Is About to Blast Two Rockets Into the Northern Lights – CNET [CNET] You May Also Like The best reef-safe sunscreens for 2022 – CNET [CNET] December 26, 2021 Thomas Giboney Two Point Campus Review And Nier: Automata Church Mystery | GI Show [Game Informer] August 4, 2022 Alex Van Aken NASA’s Osiris-Rex about to land on asteroid Bennu: Here’s what will happen – CNET [CNET] October 14, 2020 Thomas Giboney