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The interesting article this evening from Jet Propulsion Laboratory dated September 17th, NASA's tally of planets outside our solar system reaches 6,000. The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found. The official number of exoplanets outside our solar system, tracked by NASA, has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the single planet. No single planet is considered the 6,000th entry. The number is monitored by NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute, or NEXTSI, based at Caltech's IPAC in Pasadena, California. There are more than 8,000 additional candidate planets awaiting confirmation, with NASA leading the world in searching for life in the universe. This milestone represents decades of cosmic exoplanets driven by NASA's space telescopes, exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky, said Sean Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division headquarters in Washington. Step by step, from the strategy to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question, are we alone? Now with our upcoming NASA Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory, America will lead the next journey studying worlds like our own around stars like our sun. This is American utility and a promise of discovery that unites us all. The milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered around the stars similar to our sun in 1995. Prior to that, a few planets had been around stars that had burned all their fuel and collapsed. Although researchers think there are billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, finding them remains a challenge. In addition to discovering many individual planets with fascinating characteristics as the total number of known exoplanets climbs, scientists are able to see how the general planet population compares to the planets of our own solar system.