There are five commonly used methods scientists use today to discover exoplanets. In this article, we are going to talk about what techniques scientists have come up with to discover exoplanets, as it’s not as straightforward as ‘direct imaging’ discovery, as they are so far away often they are too small to identify, so clever techniques have been adopted to make the discoveries. The number of confirmed planets is in the thousands and rising rapidly, and as technology evolves and more can be seen, this number is likely to skyrocket. The closest exoplanet to Earth is called Proxima Centauri b, this exoplanet is roughly 4 light-years away. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered that there are more planets than stars in the galaxy. This is called ‘direct imaging’ and only a tiny amount of discoveries have been made this way. It’s known to be very rare for astronomers to see an exoplanet through a telescope the way you might see Saturn through a telescope from Earth. The first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s and since then thousands have been identified. Most of the exoplanets discovered so far are in a relatively small region of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Most orbit another star but some are free-floating exoplanets, called rogue planets which orbit the galactic centre and are untethered to any star. An exoplanet, or extrasolar planet, is a planet outside the solar system, usually orbiting another star in our galaxy.
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