In his database Exoplanet Archive, the US Space Agency added a batch of new planets outside our Solar System at the end of March. It is thus the symbolic milestone of 5,000 exoplanets discovered that has been crossed.
Currently, more than 8,700 discoveries from NASA missions could also be exoplanets. This is not yet confirmed with certainty by additional observations and scientific publications, hence a candidate status.
Among the more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered to date, 35% are of the Neptune type (icy giant or hot Neptune), 31% are of the super-Earth type (mass between that of the Earth and a giant planet), 30% are gas giants (similar to Jupiter or Saturn) and only 4% are telluric and therefore rocky planets.
Through the transit method
” Discovering small rocky worlds more like our own necessitated the next big leap in exoplanet-hunting technology “, writes NASA, which refers to the transit method.
This method is one of the main methods used for the detection of exoplanets. It is based on the measurement of variations in the luminous flux of a star which betray the passage of a planet. The observation of the transit makes it possible to deduce the size of an exoplanet. An associated spectroscopy method can be used to study a possible atmosphere.
NASA points out that the confirmed existence of more than 5,000 extrasolar planets represents only a fraction of the hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy.
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