Overview

• The official count is updated continuously by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, so no single discovery is designated the 6,000th planet.
• Thousands of additional candidates require follow-up observations and shared community tools before they can be confirmed, NASA officials said.
• The pace has quickened since the archive hit 5,000 three years ago, with ESA’s Gaia and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope expected to deliver thousands more via astrometry and microlensing.
• Most worlds are detected indirectly by transits and radial velocity, and fewer than 100 have been directly imaged because planetary light is overwhelmed by host stars.
• Research priorities are shifting toward rocky, potentially habitable planets and atmospheric biosignatures, with Roman’s coronagraph demonstrating starlight suppression and the Habitable Worlds Observatory concept targeting Earth-like worlds.