Exoplanet

Rare card · No. 25762

An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. In 2016, it was recognized that the first possible evidence of an exoplanet had been noted in 1917, a precovery. As of 8 October 2026, there are 6,445 confirmed exoplanets in 4,834 planetary systems, with 1,070 systems having more than one planet. There are many methods of detecting exoplanets. Transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy have found the most, but these methods suffer from a clear observational bias favoring the detection of large planets close to the star. About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars are estimated to have an "Earth-sized" planet in the habitable zone. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, it can be hypothesized that there are 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Jason Wang (Caltech)/Christian Marois (NRC Herzberg), CC BY 4.0