![]() In just the short time it’s been operating, it has confirmed the existence of 203 more exoplanets and has spotted another possible 5,459 that astronomers are now investigating. ![]() Each one of them is a new world. The newer Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in 2018, also uses the transit method, but is equipped with multiple telescopic eyes, allowing it to scan the entire bowl of the sky. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet came in 1992 when Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail discovered three planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. Exoplanet Discoveries Latest Data from NASA's Exoplanet Archive Cosmic Milestone: NASA Confirms 5,000 Exoplanets The count of confirmed exoplanets just ticked past the 5,000 mark, representing a 30-year journey of discovery led by NASA space telescopes. Still, in the 11 years it operated, it confirmed the existence of 2,709 exoplanets and has returned data still being studied about a possible 2,057 more. ![]() And Kepler studied only a tiny portion of the sky, encompassing just 150,000 stars. The dimming is fantastically subtle-the equivalent of removing a single light bulb from a board of 10,000 of them, is how Natalie Batalha, former Kepler mission director, described it to TIME. ![]() Launched in 2009, it hunts for planets using the so-called transit method-looking for the slight dimming in light that occurs when an orbiting planet briefly blocks the light from the star. The majority of the discoveries were made by the Kepler Space Telescope. The convention for designating exoplanets is an extension of the system used for designating multiple-star systems as adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
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