The stars TESS studies are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, enabling far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telesc...

An animation of an imagined Earth-sized exoplanet.

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

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

Exoplanets can be pretty weird places, but do their names have to be so weird, too? Watch and learn how the scientific community determines and categorizes these unique planets.

Astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting plan...

Video of the Kepler spacecraft launch from March 2009.

When we talk about the enormity of the cosmos, it’s easy to toss out big numbers – but far more difficult to wrap our minds around just how large, how far and how numerous celestial bodies really a...

Video feature describing the process and implications of the planetary color analysis.

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

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...

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...

Animation of Kepler spacecraft slowly rotating in space.

This episode of "Hubble at 25" uncovers Hubble's Key role in the study of planets beyond our solar system.

Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery mission. It is designed specifically to detect Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of solar-like stars.

A new NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

An animation explaining how the hybrid Lyot coronagraph works. Watch the longer version here.

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.

An animation depicting various orbit geometries, some of which permit view of transits, and others that do not.

This slide explains the radial velocity method for exoplanet detection. 

Kepler-10b as a scorched world, orbiting at a distance that’s more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our own Sun.

Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler science team put together a visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011.

A detailed explanation into the workings of the coronagraph and how it can help directly image exoplanets.

HD 80606b is a gas giant planet in an eccentric orbit around its star. Every 111 days, the planet passes within 2.8 million miles of the star's surface. Animated with dissolves between frames.

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