Fast-forward to today: we’ve gone from one lonely planet to a catalog of thousands. The pace is accelerating. In 2015, NASA’s Kepler telescope had confirmed its 1,000th exoplanet. By 2022, the tally ...

By 2015, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered its 1,000th exoplanet. 2016 was a banner year for exoplanet detections with nearly 1,500 in that year alone. The total number reached 5,000 in March ...

This brings us to the complexity of NASA's announcement. "Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the 6,000th ...