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Asked by valiqatanveer to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 18 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by applepie7.
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Martin Archer answered on 18 Mar 2013:
Loads. It’s hard to put a number because we don’t know how many there are. We’ve found hundreds of them in the last few years and we’re getting better at finding them. In fact we tend to find them pretty much everywhere, so given how big even just our Galaxy is there’s likely to be loads that we’ve not spotted yet.
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Amy Tyndall answered on 18 Mar 2013:
An infinite number! There are billions and billions of stars in our Universe, and many of these have the possibility of having planets orbiting around them. We’ll never be able to count them all, just as we’ll never be able to count all the grains of sand on a beach…
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Grant Kennedy answered on 18 Mar 2013:
In the Solar System, it’s very unlikely that there are any more planets to be discovered. There’s a chance that one exists that is very distant, but it would be almost impossible to find if it did.
Around other stars there are probably billions of planets that we haven’t found yet. It seems likely that almost every star formed some planets, so if there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and even only half of them have planets, that’s a lot of planets!
It’s actually really hard to find planets, so all the ones we know about are actually very close to the Solar System. The ones that are farther away are just too hard to find, so we’ve probably only searched a few hundred thousand stars for planets.
The smaller the planet, the harder it is to find, so in the future the focus will be on doing a better job for the stars we’ve looked at already to try to discover smaller and smaller planets. The goal is to get good enough that we can find another version of our Earth!
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