Overview

• NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC maintains the official, rolling count, so no single planet is designated as the 6,000th entry.
• More than 8,000 additional candidates are listed in the NASA Exoplanet Archive awaiting confirmation through follow-up observations.
• Discovery has accelerated since the database passed 5,000 three years ago, with ESA’s Gaia and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope expected to contribute thousands more candidates.
• Most planets are found by indirect methods such as transits, radial velocity, microlensing, and astrometry, and fewer than 100 have been directly imaged.
• JWST has analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres, and future capabilities from Roman’s coronagraph and the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory target direct studies of Earth-like worlds.