At a public seminar at NASA JPL, Jessie Christiansen and Karl Stapelfeldt of Caltech and NASA talked about the exoplanets discoveries made thus far and those to be made by new observatories:<\/p>\n
Since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star in 1995, several thousand more have been discovered. We\u2019ve peered into the atmospheres of some, and we\u2019ve found whole families of planets orbiting strange stars — many in configurations starkly different from our own. We\u2019ve learned a lot from NASA’s Kepler mission, which launched 10 years ago and ceased operations in November 2018. A new NASA planet-hunting spacecraft called TESS, which began science operations as Kepler was winding down, will give us thousands of new discoveries in the coming years. And the Spitzer Space Telescope has provided us valuable insights into what these worlds might be like. This show will look at the state of exoplanet science and give us a view of what future discoveries may be around the corner.<\/em><\/p>\n