Exoplanet confirmation jumps to 5000
According to NASA archives, more than 5,000 planets have already been discovered outside our solar system.
Who said space exploration was out of fashion? If the era is no longer in the frantic race for the Moon, Western companies continue to push the exploration of space ever further. A slow exploration but which, over the decades, has allowed men to learn more and more about their distant surroundings… and their great loneliness in the universe, at least at this hour.
Witness this information recently revealed by NASA , and reported by BFMTV. According to the legendary American space agency, more than 5,000 exoplanets have already been discovered and formally identified to date. A feat, since the term “exoplanet” refers to planets located outside our solar system.
It is the addition of 65 recently discovered planets that has enabled NASA to pass the symbolic milestone of 5,000 objects “formally identified by specialists”. A particularly impressive figure, but which remains infinitesimal compared to reality: according to NASA, there are probably “hundreds of billions” of planets outside our solar system.
If such figures can make you dizzy, the space agency wants to clarify things: “It’s not just a number. Each of them is a new world, a whole new planet,” explains Jessie Christiansen, NASA researcher in charge of the archives concerned. With the backdrop of the most fascinating quest in the history of humankind: “I think it is inevitable that we will find a form of life somewhere,” confessed Alexander Wolszczan, astronomer at Pennsylvania State University.
