With the number of exoplanets having recently passed the 6,000 mark, astronomers are busy preparing for many thousands more in the coming years, with underutilized planet-finding techniques about to come to the fore to add the deluge from transit surveys.
"We've found 6,000 planets, but none of them are like Earth," said Aurora Kesseli, an astronomer at Caltech who works on NASA's Exoplanet Archive keeping a tally of the worlds already discovered, in an interview with Space.com. "So when people ask why we are still looking for exoplanets when we have found 6,000 of them, it's because we haven't found an Earth-like planet yet. But there are a lot of the upcoming missions that are really tuned-in to try and find something that actually looks like Earth."
