![]() ![]() Many of the exoplanets discovered early on were so-called "hot Jupiters," large gas giants that orbit very close to their parent star. While Kepler's mission is focused on finding planets like Earth orbiting in the "habitable zones" (where liquid water may exist on the planet's surface) of their stars, the telescope has discovered a wide variety of planets. ![]() ![]() Since then, thousands of exoplanet candidates have been found, most of them with the Kepler Space Telescope. The first confirmed exoplanet discovery was in 1992, with the discovery of PSR B1257+12 around a pulsar star the first main-sequence star discovery (51 Pegasi b) was found in 1995. The urge to classify planets has increased since exoplanet discoveries became more frequent. In 2017, a group of scientists, including Stern, proposed a new definition of planet, which they plan to submit to the IAU: "A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters." Classifying planets ![]()
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