Alien Planet Count Passes a Thousand
Number of confirmed exoplanets soars past milestone.
The grand tally of planets we now know exist beyond our solar system—also known as exoplanets—has climbed past a thousand, according to the online Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.
After just two decades of hunting, this symbolic milestone was surpassed with this week's announcement of the discovery of 11 new worlds by the British Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) detection program. (Related: "Bumper Crop of Habitable Worlds Discovered?")
While the total number of planets known to orbit distant stars has skyrocketed to an impressive 1,010, thousands of potential worlds are still on the waiting list to be confirmed, and billions more remain undetected across the Milky Way galaxy (map).
"One thousand confirmed exoplanets in
