PlanetQuest - the number of Exoplanets Found is about to skyrocket!

PlanetQuest: Exoplanet Exploration

NASA's JPL/CalTech website reports the current exoplanet count at 453 as of June 19, 2010. The number of stars with planets is a bit lower and stands at 385, meaning that some stars have more than one planet orbiting them.

The image below is a screen shot (from this author's screen) of a widget for your desktop and can be downloaded from the PlanetQuest Planet Counter page. It will keep you current on the hunt for exoplanets, but you'll have to have Yahoo! Widgets installed to make it work.

As soon as the recent first data set from the Kepler mission, which is devoted to finding exoplanets (particularly, Earth-like planets), is fully analyzed, the count of exoplanets is sure to skyrocket. But right now, the data set, just released to the public, reports 306 exoplanet "candidates." That means those candidate explanets must still be confirmed before adding them to the official exoplanet count.

Just How Important Do You Think You Are?

At Left: Hubble Space Telescope image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, nearby galaxy of our own Milky Way


As of March 7, 2009 there are approximately 6.76 billion people on Earth. And over 300 planets outside our own Solar System (exoplanets) have been discovered - all within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. And we are just now scratching the surface of possible planets out there. Recently, unbelievable as it sounds, we have even confirmed the discovery of a planet in another galaxy (extragalactic planet) - the Andromeda galaxy, nearby to our own Milky Way!