Are new planets still news? Probably not.

This year, 2020, marks the 25th anniversary of the discovery of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. In the past few years we’ve started finding planets with masses not too different to Earth’s mass, and it seems that every few weeks there is a new announcement about new world in some star’s habitable zone.

This week is one of those weeks. In a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, a team of researchers led by Canegie’s Fabo Feng and Paul Butler announce the discovery of two super Earths, with masses 7.5 & 7.9 times the mass of Earth. These two planets orbit different red dwarf stars, and may be positioned such that they can have liquid water on their surface.

These planets, along with 3 other confirmed worlds and 8 candidate worlds, expand our catalogue of more than 4000 planets outside our solar system. At this point, I’m not sure the discovery of a new world around yet another red dwarf is still news or astronomy as usual.

I am seeing the bias of so many of us journalists being old enough to have grown up without exoplanets, so we’re still like “Oh cool — PLANET”. But at some point, we need to probably just admit, stars generally have planets, planets regularly exist in habitable zones, and as long as we keep looking for planets, we’re going to keep finding planets. At this point, I think that unless something truly novel is discovered, we’re going to stop calling the new planets news. If it is a particularly slow news day, we may do a periodic round up of newly found worlds….

But yes, new planets are astronomy as usual.

The art used in this article is by me an is available on Etsy and Society 6. This content was used in today’s episode of The Daily Space. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.