Joel Kontinen
How many
exoplanets are there? A new survey put the number at over 10,000. But how many of them harbour life is difficult
question, as only the creator can create life-giving minerals and other elements to a planet.
Since
the first alien planet was spotted in
1995, the number of
exoplanet discoveries has slowly risen in line with new technologies, such as
the James Webb Space Telescope, which are better equipped to spot
these weird alien worlds. In September 2025, astronomers
revealed that the number of confirmed exoplanets had surpassed 6,000, and nearly 300 have been added to
the list since then, according to NASA.
But in a
new study uploaded April 20 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that they've uncovered an
astonishing 11,554 exoplanet candidates at once. If all of them can be
confirmed, it would bring the total number of exoplanets to nearly 18,000,
which is almost triple the current total.
Using a
machine learning algorithm, the team analyzed the light curves of precisely
83,717,159 stars captured by NASA's
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a car-sized space telescope that
has been circling Earth since 2018. By looking for subtle dips in the stars'
brightness, astronomers can tell when a planet has likely passed in front of,
or transited, its home star.
This
revealed more than 11,000 exoplanet candidates, of which 10,052 had never been
seen before. Around 87% of the candidates were spotted transiting twice or
more, allowing the researchers to calculate the planets' orbital periods, which
range from 0.5 to 27 days, according to StellarCatalog.com.
Using one
of the 21-foot (6.5 meters) Magellan telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, the
team identified a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet, dubbed TIC 183374187 b, that orbits a star around 3,950
light-years from Earth — right where the algorithm predicted.
TESS was
specifically designed to detect transiting objects, and it has already
discovered 882 confirmed exoplanets — roughly 14% of the current total — so it
may seem strange that no one has seen most of the new candidates until now.
Most
researchers prioritize analyzing the light curves of the brightest stars in the
TESS dataset, because transit events for these stars are much more noticeable
and easier to confirm. But there are many more faint stars that end up being
captured in the telescope's wide-field photos.
Source:
Harry Baker 2026 Scientists identify 10,000 'impossible' exoplanet candidates, potentially tripling the number of known alien worlds | Live Science 2 May
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