WASHINGTON D.C.: NASA scientists have announced that they have identified more than 5,000 planets existing beyond Earth’s solar system, adding that the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009 and retired in 2018, has by itself led to the discovery of more than 2,600 planets.

In the announcement this week, Jessie Christiansen, research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena, said, “It is not just a number. Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them.”

NASA has stated that since the first exoplanet, the term for a planet found outside our solar system, was discovered in 1995, scientists have discovered a variety of planets, including “small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and ‘hot Jupiters’ in scorchingly close orbits around their stars.”

In a NASA interview posted on Twitter and YouTube, Natalie Batalha, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California, said, “When I started research, there were no known exoplanets. I feel like I have had a front row seat to this new field being born, and then also becoming part of it.”

Among other interesting finds, scientists using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile discovered an exoplanet which is 10 times larger than Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of stars in another solar system 325 light-years from Earth.

In 2020, NASA discovered an Earth-like planet among the exoplanets, using observations from the Kepler Space Telescope.

In a statement, William Borucki, who developed the concept of the Kepler Space Telescope, said, “I get a real feeling of satisfaction, and really of awe, at what is out there. None of us expected this enormous variety of planetary systems and stars. It is just amazing.”

As part of NASA’s announcement, Alexander Wolszczan, the lead author on the paper 30 years ago describing the first exoplanets, said, “With the ongoing explorations, scientists are likely to discover signs of life on other planets eventually.”