We’ve Found 5,000 Exoplanets and We’re Still Alone
So far, the search for a truly Earth-like world has turned up empty.
Our universe is full of other worlds, orbiting their own suns. For most of human history, this was just an assumption, not a fact; astronomers could only peer through telescopes at distant stars and daydream about the planets that might be hiding in their glow. But then, about 30 years ago—quite recently, when you consider how long humans have been gazing at the skies—the cold, hard data appeared. Astronomers began to detect the signals of worlds beyond our solar system—just a few at first, and then, as more sophisticated instruments became available, hundreds and hundreds. And now, according to NASA’s numbers, the count of confirmed exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy
