When a planet crosses directly between us and its star, we see the star dim slightly because the planet is blocking out a portion of the light. We can make a plot called a light curve with the brig...

A night test of a small-scale starshade model shows how the starshade could block bright light from telescopes.

Depiction of a world completely covered with ocean.

This image shows our own back yard, astronomically speaking, from a vantage point about 30 light-years away from the sun. It highlights the population of tiny brown dwarfs recently discovered by NA...

Exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – are everywhere. At NASA, we're studying exoplanets to learn all about their weirdness, their variety, and all the fascinating things they can tell us...

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will reveal secrets of clouds in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets beyond our solar system.

Watch the PlanetQuest interactive timeline in video format!

The habitable zone is the distance from a star where one can have liquid water on the surface of a planet. If a planet is too close to its parent star, it will be too hot and water would have evapo...

If life exists on some of the exoplanets that Kepler finds, it may exist in forms similar to what we see in some of Earth's most extreme conditions.

This animated slide explains and illustrates the astronomical objects present throughout the universe stretching from our solar system outward.

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity. 

The habitable zone is the distance from a star where one can have liquid water on the surface of a planet. If a planet is too close to its parent star, it will be too hot and water would have evapo...

This animation shows the first-ever map of the surface of an exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system.

Every star has a habitable zone, but where that zone lies is different for stars of different sizes and brightness.

NASA has confirmed more than 5,000 worlds beyond our solar system during 30 years of exploration. There are billions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone, so many more discoveries await.

This artist's animation flies through the Kepler-20 star system, where NASA's Kepler mission discovered the first Earth-size planets around a star beyond our own. The system is jam-packed with five...

The first extra-solar planet detected around a star similar to the Sun was 51 Peg. It has about the mass of Jupiter. But unlike Jupiter, which is five times as far from the Sun as Earth and orbits ...

This slide compares the Kepler Space Telescope to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope.

Animation of HAT-P-7 light curve with magnified y-axis to better show the occultation dip in brightness. When the planet passes behind the star, light that is reflecting off the planet from the sta...

Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), the most versatile spectrograph ever to fly on Hubble, ceased operations in August 2004 due to the failure of its power supply. The STIS instrument's ac...

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star that may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity.

This slide breaks down and explains what black holes are.

Kepler is launched at night on a Delta 2 expendable launch vehicle.

Learn more about how to use the basic functions of Eyes on Exoplanets

Video of the Kepler spacecraft launch from March 2009.