In a milestone for astronomy – and possibly the search for extraterrestrial life – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed there are now 5,000 known planets beyond our solar system.
These so-called exoplanets include rocky worlds roughly the size of Earth, gas giants larger than Jupiter and ‘mini-Neptunes.’
“It’s not just a number,” Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, said in a statement.
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