At around midday on Tuesday this week, on a page buried deep in the internet, a small counter ticked over to an important new value. Despite it’s obscurity, the slow and infrequent beat of this clock feels the pulse of an entire scientific community. And it’s one that is gaining vitality and momentum with every year. 
This new number was, of course, exoplanet number 1000. It was also joined by numbers 1001 through 1010, which were announced simultaneously by the WASP team. These eleven new worlds were added to the swelling ranks of alien planets that, less than 20 years ago, seemed completely beyond the grasp of science.
While it may sound like a definitive tally, the politics over who keeps track of exoplanet numbers is a disputed area. The figure of 1000 was logged by the exoplanet.eu database which includes some unpublished and contentious planets. The NASA database and US-based exoplanets.org, on the other hand, lag behind with 919 and 755 entries respectively.
But despite the arguments, the real take-home message is that exoplanetary science is an incredibly dynamic young field. This year alone has seen another 141 new worlds discovered, with more than a dozen expected by the end of the year (Our WASP team has another 30 confirmed planets to publish in the next few months). To put it into perspective; from the first discovery of such a planet in 1994, it took 11 more years to reach 150. Helped by new technology and a ground-swell of funding into the subject, we will reach this tally in one. 
A quick analysis of the numbers shows that the number really is expanding exponentially. If we continue to discover new worlds at this rate (as fitted by the x^4 red line above), that number will pass 10,000 worlds by 2029 and 100,000 in only 40 years. It was more than 2000 years ago that Epicurus wrote “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours inhabited by living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world” and in the space of only 20 we have proved him right.
New WASP planets published here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.5654 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.5630 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.5607
Related articles and blogs
- Happy One Thousand Exoplanets… (Probably) by Katy Savage
- On the Road to One Thousand Exoplanets (universetoday.com)
- Exoplanet tally soars above 1,000 (bbc.co.uk)