Overview

• As of September 19, NASA’s archive lists 6,007 confirmed exoplanets after a new batch of 18 mostly rocky, sub-Neptune worlds identified with TESS, ground telescopes and reanalyzed Kepler data.
• NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech updates the tally continuously, so no individual world is designated the 6,000th discovery.
• More than 8,000 additional candidates await confirmation, and the pace has quickened since the database crossed 5,000 just three years ago.
• Most finds come from indirect methods such as transits and radial velocity, fewer than 100 have been directly imaged, and JWST has analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres.
• Upcoming contributions are expected from ESA’s Gaia astrometry and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope microlensing survey and coronagraph demo, with the Habitable Worlds Observatory in concept studies to target Earth-like planets.