Artist's impression of the nonexistent Fomalhaut b, an exoplanet directly observed by the Hubble telescopePlanet Fomalhaut b (inset against Fomalhaut's interplanetary dust cloud) imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope's coronagraph (NASA photo)Discovery image of the Gliese 758 system, taken with Subaru telescope in the near infrared. It is unclear whether the companion should be regarded as a planet or a brown dwarf.2MASS J044144 is a brown dwarf with a companion about 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. It is not clear whether this companion object is a sub-brown dwarf or a planet.Exoplanet discoveries by year
In 2013, estimates of the number of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way ranged from at least 17 billion[1] to at least 144 billion.[2] The smaller estimate studied planet candidates gathered by the Kepler space observatory.[3] Among them are 461 Earth-size planets, at least four of which are in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist. One of the four, dubbed Kepler-69c, is a mere 1.5 times the size of the Earth and around a star like our own Sun – about as near as the current data allow to finding an "Earth 2.0".[4]
Earlier work suggested that there are at least 100 billion planets of all types in our galaxy, an average of at least one per star. There are also planets that orbit brown dwarfs, and free-floating planets that orbit the galaxy directly just as the stars do. It is unclear whether either type should be called a "planet".[5][6][7]
Analogies with planets in the Solar System apply to few of the extrasolar planets known. Most are quite unlike any of our planets, for example the so-called "hot Jupiters".