IKI RAS told about more than 6 thousand exoplanets known to mankind

To date, scientists have known more than six thousand exoplanets, and this number is constantly increasing. This was announced on May 16 by a researcher at the Planetary Physics Department of the Space Research Institute (IRI). Russian Academy of Sciences Vladislav Ananyev.

"Today, more than six thousand exoplanets are known. Planets are discovered weekly, sometimes one or two at a time, sometimes ten at once. That is, this number is continuously but unevenly growing," she said in an interview with RIA Novosti.

Ananyeva explained that such growth is associated with the development of methods and tools for detecting exoplanets. Initially, only the radial velocity method was used, which made it possible to find 10-20 planets per year. With the advent of specialized space missions, such as the American Kepler telescope, which operated from 2009 to 2018 and used the transit method, the number of discoveries has increased dramatically.

According to the scientist, a significant increase in new planets occurs after the publication of catalogs compiled according to the data of a particular telescope.

Currently, the scientific community is awaiting the release of a new catalog from the European GAIA satellite, which is capable of detecting planets using astrometry, a method based on detecting star fluctuations caused by the influence of planets orbiting them. Although the device itself has already completed its work, the analysis of its data continues, and the most complete catalog is expected by 2030.

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Universe Today magazine reported on April 26 that an international team of researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered clouds of water ice in the atmosphere of the exoplanet Epsilon Indi A (Eps Ind Ab), called super Jupiter, which casts doubt on existing models of planetary atmospheric formation. This exoplanet is known as a cold space object with an estimated temperature of about 275 kelvin (+2 degrees), which is higher than Jupiter (140 kelvin, -133 degrees). Astronomers claim that this indicates an early stage of the planet's formation.