Watch what happens in the life of a star and its planets. This version of the video has no text overlays.

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...

This slide explains some of the history of exoplanet detection over the last 30+ years.

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...

Kepler is launched at night (10:48 PM EST) on a Delta 2 expendable launch vehicle.

Video of the Kepler spacecraft launch from March 2009.

Animation of the Kepler spacecraft ejecting its dust cover.

Animation of a frozen planet, similar to worlds in our own solar system's Kuiper Belt.

Video of the LBTI instrument's view of the sky.

We've wanted to study the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope since its Christmas Day launch in 2021. We expect to see new science on the planets in the coming year.

This slide explains the three different types of black holes.

NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen and TESS Project Scientist Padi Boyd discuss Kepler's legacy, the search for life and the big question: Are we alone?

The flower you see in this animation isn’t NASA’s attempt to celebrate the coming of spring. It’s actually the latest design in a cutting-edge effort to take pictures of planets orbiting stars far ...

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...

On this episode of Q&Alien, we talk about what the term "habitable zone" means - and what it doesn't.

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.

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.

Kepler does not directly observe the image of a planet. Rather it observes the effect the planet has on its parent star. If the orbit of the planet is aligned along Kepler's line of sight to the st...

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...

After a 43-minute coast in low Earth orbit, the Kepler launch vehicle's second stage is fired for a final time.

Lurking beyond our solar system, among the billions of stars and the exoplanets that orbit them, is another sort of Milky Way altogether. Our "Galaxy of Horrors" reveals the sinister science behind...

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...

Weighing in at 11 times Jupiter’s mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance, planet HD 106906 b is unlike anything in our own Solar System and throws a wrench in planet...

On March 21, 2022, the number of known exoplanets passed 5,000 according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. This animation and sonification tracks humanity's discovery of the planets beyond our solar s...

When a planet passes directly between a star and its observer, it dims the star's light by a measurable amount. Light curves get complicated when more planets are transiting a star. The combined li...