How many exoplanets are there?

To date, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered "confirmed" out of the billions in our galaxy alone. There are thousands of other "candidate" exoplanet detections that require further observations in order to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real.

Remarkably, the first exoplanets were just discovered in the 1990s. We live in an extraordinary time where in the span of a single generation, the centuries-old question "Are there planets orbiting other stars?" has been answered with a resounding "Yes!"