This year, we’ve found 736 planets orbiting distant stars.
This incredible GIF shows how many planets we’ve found in 2014
That fact alone is remarkable. But it’s even more amazing when you consider that we didn’t find a single one of these exoplanets until 1989, and only found 1045 of them in total in the 23 years following that.
Here’s a terrific GIF that shows just how huge this year’s haul has been, spotted by Laura Olin:
Of the 736 spotted so far this year, a whopping 715 came in one announcement, made by NASA scientists in Feburary (this announcement is the orange bar in the GIF).
The Kepler space telescope — which orbits the sun, taking high-resolution images of distant stars so scientists can look for planets surrounding them — was responsible for these 715 planets, along with 246 planets announced at other times, including the potentially Earth-like planet announced last week.
Unfortunately, the Kepler telescope was temporarily shut down in May 2013 because of an equipment failure. NASA is currently planning a secondary mission for Kepler that will allow it to keep collecting data despite these limitations.
There are also new exoplanet-spotting telescopes that will go into operation in 2018 and 2020 — making it likely that we’ll continue finding distant planets, including some that could be home to alien life.
Correction: This post originally stated that Kepler was permanently shut down, and did not mention the possibility of its secondary mission.
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