When I was a kid, being stuck with just the Sun’s nine planets drove me half mad. Astronomers suspected there were planets circling other stars, but the brute fact was that nobody knew. The uncertainty made my skin crawl.
Carl Sagan made matters worse by vividly fantasizing about a future in which you could thumb through an “Encyclopedia Galactica,” a catalog of known worlds and civilizations. He wondered, ominously, what our entry would say.
Well, the first “extrasolar planet” was discovered about 10 years ago, and today something like 20 new planets are announced every month. Within a few weeks, the total number of known planets will hit 200. It’s almost impossible to keep up with these announcements (especially since a few don’t pan out and are later withdrawn).
The May issue of “Sky and Telescope” reports that a planet recently found circling a pulsar has a mass of 0.0004 that of Earth’s — that is, it’s basically just an asteroid. The rate and variety of discoveries is going to do nothing but accelerate, and fast. We’ll have our own page in an “Encyclopedia Galactica” sooner that Carl thought.