Exoplanet tally soars above 1,000

The number of observed exoplanets - worlds circling distant stars - has soared past 1,000 and is expected to grow even further, scientists say.
The list of new exoplanets in a catalogue maintained by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo now contains 1,010 confirmed exoplanets.
Of these, 12 could be habitable - orbiting at a distance where it is neither "too hot" nor "too cold" for water to be liquid on the surface.
The number of exoplanets is expected to grow further as over 3,500 exoplanet candidates - most of them detected by Nasa's Kepler space telescope - are waiting for confirmation.

Abel Mendez of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory said that reaching 1,000 marks an important milestone in the quest to understand the history of the evolution of the cosmos.
He added that although the number of exoplanets has increased in recent years, due to a lack of funding this figure is much lower than it could be.

"We have more techniques and proven technology to detect more exoplanets, but the limit has been telescopes, especially space telescopes. If we had more funding there would be more telescopes and that count would be much larger by now," Mendez told 'BBC News'.
The exoplanet catalogue at the university is organised by Jean Schneider, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory. For the past 18 years he has catalogued new exoplanets on the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.

Since NASA only accepts exoplanets announced in an academic journal it updates its list far less frequently. The US space agency's tally currently stands at 919 confirmed worlds.
In January 2013, astronomers used Kepler's data to estimate that there could be at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy.