There are 4,696 planet candidates now known with the release of the seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog - an increase of 521 since the release of the previous catalog in Jan. 2015.

Orbiting planets cause stars to wobble in space, changing the color of the light astronomers observe.

This artist's concept illustrates how planetary systems arise out of massive collisions between rocky bodies.

This artist's conception shows the 30 Ari system, which includes four stars and a planet.

Exoplanet atmospheres might one day reveal the presence of life.

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.

55 Cancri e is a super Earth exoplanet that orbits a G-type star. Its mass is 8.08 Earths, it takes 0.7 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 0.01544 AU from its star. Its discovery was an...

This slide explains the three different types of black holes.

This plot shows the masses and sizes of the smallest exoplanets for which both quantities have been measured. The solar system planets (shown in red) are for comparison.

The results from Kepler will come from measuring the brightness of the stars. The data will look like an EKG showing the heart beat. Whenever a planet passes in front of its parent star as viewed f...

The two planets of Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system -- a system with more than one planet orbiting a pair of stars. Kepler-47b, on the right, has three times the radius of earth ...

The Kepler spacecraft, responsible for thousands of new potential disoveries.

Planets, including those like our own Earth, form from epic collisions between asteroids and even bigger bodies, called proto-planets. Sometimes the colliding bodies are ground to dust, and sometim...

Launched in March 2009, NASA’s first planet-hunter confirmed more than 2,600 planets beyond our solar system. "Many stars have planets. A lot of these planets are Earth-sized. That's Kepler's legac...

This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. It is the first planet that NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed to or...

For a planet, the habitable zone is the distance from a star that allows liquid water to persist on its surface – as long as that planet has a suitable atmosphere.

Kepler-7b (left), which is 1.5 times the radius of Jupiter (right), is the first exoplanet to have its clouds mapped. This artist's concept shows what those clouds might look like. The cloud map wa...

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...

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...

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 plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope tells astronomers that a toasty gas exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system, contains water vapor.

Using NASA’s Hubble Telescope, scientists detected a stratosphere on the planet WASP-33b. A stratosphere occurs when molecules in the atmosphere absorb ultraviolet and visible light from the star. ...

Audience: 3rd grade and older Asteroids move much faster than airplanes; and are also much bigger.

Twenty years ago astronomers discovered the first planet around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b. This is the story of the pioneers in planet-hunting and how those who have followed are now poised to a...

A planet’s density is determined by its composition as well as its size: Gravity compresses the material a planet is made of, increasing the planet’s density. Uncompressed density adjusts for the e...