Astronomers are on the cusp of adding very substantially to the planetary data trove. NASA’s TESS Mission, the successor to Kepler, was successfully launched in April of this year and is currently monitoring stars for transiting planets. During its two-year prime mission, TESS will survey the entire sky, sifting over a thousand new planets from a sample of roughly 200,000 bright nearby stars.

Simultaneously, a slew of new high-precision spectrographs for making Doppler velocity measurements are coming online. A recent conference featured presentations from 23 separate teams, many of whom described instruments (such as EXPRES in the Northern Hemisphere and ESPRESSO in the Southern) which are already taking data, and which will reach the velocity precisions of order centimeters per second that are required to sense Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits.

The Milky Way contains over a trillion planets. While we are nowhere remotely close to a full accounting of this vast population, the outlines of the distribution, and how it came to be, are rapidly falling within our grasp.

Quelle: Scientific American