How many Exoplanets have we discovered so far?

The number crossed 4,000 in June!

For as long as humans have walked the face of the Earth, we have looked up in the sky & wondered whether we are alone in the Universe or if there are other Worlds like ours. Are we the only intelligent life form or are there other ones like us out there? These burning questions have led us on a path to discovery, where we have been looking for other habitable planets called Exoplanets.

The breakthrough came in 1992 when radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Ever since that first discovery, hundreds of these celestial bodies have been added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which has details of all the discoveries. To date, there have been 4025 confirmed exoplanet discoveries.

As the technique to identify such planets got refined over the years, the inventory of such planets began to get bigger. The biggest leap, however, came when Kepler Space Telescope went online in 2009. That’s when we really saw exponential growth in the discovery of exoplanets. To put all these planets in a map, NASA has recently released an impressive video visualization of Alien Worlds in collaboration with System Sounds, a science outreach project (shown below).