Question 1

Who is finding them now?

Accepted Answer

Mostly TESS, which surveys nearly the whole sky in strips looking for transits, together with ground-based spectrographs that confirm the candidates and measure their masses. Kepler's archive still yields new confirmations more than a decade after the telescope stopped observing.

Question 2

How long does a confirmation take?

Accepted Answer

Usually years. A transit has to repeat at least three times to fix a period, and a second, independent method has to rule out the things that mimic a planet — a faint eclipsing pair of stars in the same pixel is the classic false positive.

Question 3

What does the discovery date mean?

Accepted Answer

The year the object was announced as confirmed, not the year the data were taken. Those can be a decade apart: a signal sits in an archive until somebody looks, and confirmation usually needs a second method to agree with the first.

Question 4

Why does the list move in jumps rather than steadily?

Accepted Answer

Because confirmations arrive in batches. A survey works through its candidates and publishes them together, so a single paper can add hundreds on one day and the months either side of it add almost nothing.

Question 5

How many exoplanets have been confirmed?

Accepted Answer

Several thousand, and the number rises every month. The count that matters is confirmed rather than candidate: surveys hold tens of thousands of candidates, and historically a substantial minority of those do not survive follow-up.

Question 6

Why do some entries have no discovery year?

Accepted Answer

Because the upstream catalogue records none, usually for an object whose planetary status was established gradually across several papers rather than announced once. Those rows are simply left out of this ranking rather than given a guessed date.

Question 7

Will the rate keep rising?

Accepted Answer

It moves in steps rather than trends, because confirmations arrive in batches when a survey publishes. The next large steps are expected from missions designed to measure planets rather than to count them.

The most recently discovered exoplanets

COMMON QUESTIONS