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Five thousand exoplanets at the NASA Exoplanet Archive

The past three decades have seen the number of known exoplanets grow by over three orders of magnitude. To mark the milestone, the Lead Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, Jessie Christiansen, looks at the history, the contents and the future of this community resource.

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Fig. 1: Four panels showing the cumulative progress of exoplanet discovery with time.
Fig. 2: The cumulative number of confirmed planets in the NASA Exoplanet Archive, with some key dates labelled.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to D. Ciardi and M. Harbut for proofreading and fact-checking drafts of this work. And thank you to the whole NASA Exoplanet Archive team and my co-lead, Lead Engineer D. McElroy for helping make the archive what it is today, and for perseverance and excellence in the face of significant disruptions over the last few years.

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Correspondence to Jessie L. Christiansen.

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Christiansen, J.L. Five thousand exoplanets at the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Nat Astron 6, 516–519 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01661-8

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