But Among The Several Thousand Exoplanets

But among the several thousand exoplanets, should we expect that some of them would be more likely to host life than others?Life should be abundant throughout the cosmos. But the distance scale is also incredibly vast, even among the nearest stars. But thats a topic for another time.

Artists concept of the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope. In its primary mission, Kepler single-handedly discovered thousands of new exoplanets. It went on to continue to discover more exoplanets, though at a slower rate, in its extended K2 mission.

Since then, close to 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed in our galaxy. Astronomers have detected another 5,000 planetary candidatesobjects that might be planets but have yet to be confirmed. Now, the list of planets has shrunk by at least three.

Among the detected exoplanets, there are many Super-Earths, which are assumed to have a rocky composition but are larger than Earth.Conversely, the different integrands for the WCA potential vary by several eV and some show considerable curvature (upper panel).

"One thousand confirmed exoplanets in 21 years is a small number considering conservative estimates on the expected number of exoplanets per star," said Abel Mendez, an astronomer at the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico.