The orbit of a planet can cause a star to wobble around in space in relation to nearby stars in the sky.

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

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

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.

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. 

Astronomers can take pictures of exoplanets by removing the overwhelming glare of the stars they orbit.

Learn more about cool tricks you can do in Eyes on Exoplanets.

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

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...

Ball Aerospace team assembles Kepler spacecraft

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...

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

Researchers made a brightness map, tracing the glow from hot regions of WASP-18 b as it slipped behind, and reappeared from, its star.

This video shows an artist's impression of the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9.

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

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...

Within our own solar system we can observe planetary transits of Mercury and Venus when they pass in front of the Sun as viewed from Earth. Kepler will observe the same phenomena in order to detect...

This slide explains some of the main differences between black holes and planets. 

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...

This is the animated storybook tale of the Spitzer spacecraft and its exploits as part of the space telescope superteam known as NASA’s Great Observatories, which also includes Hubble, Chandra and ...

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...

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

How do astronomers take actual pictures of exoplanets, and why is it such a difficult thing to do? Josh from PlanetQuest talks about what's involved in making an exoplanet portrait.

The Kepler mission will be looking continuously at over 100,000 stars in one region of the sky, in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. The field of view is extremely large for an astronomical teles...

This slide explains the three different types of black holes.