14 DAY TRIAL // There are now officially over 1,000 exoplanets known to us. There are several thousand planet candidates, but over 1,000 have been now confirmed by observations and are considered science fact, as far as the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia is concerned.
That is a major milestone for human space exploration, particularly since it's only been a couple of decades since the first planets outside of our solar system were found.
Since then, we've come a long way, though there still is a lot to learn even about the few planets we know about. Some estimates put the number of planets in the Milky Way in the hundreds of billions, so we can't even say we're scratching the surface.
What's more, we haven't found any planets yet that are similar to Earth in size, composition, and proximity to their star.
But you can expect quite a few more planets to be confirmed in future years, even if Kepler had to abandon its planet-hunting mission early. Data from the Kepler Space Telescope will keep astronomers busy for years.