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...

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.

Large gas-giant planets like Jupiter may be more rare in the galaxy than small, rocky worlds like Earth.

How do coronagraphs find exoplanets? Find out in this animation narrated by Dr. Nick Siegler, Technology Manager of the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program.

This plot shows data obtained from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, telescope located in Chile, during a "microlensing" event. Microlensing ...

Animation of the Kepler spacecraft ejecting its dust cover.

If astronomers could somehow pull planets out of the sky and analyze them in the laboratory, it might look something like this artistically altered image illustrating new research from NASA's Spitz...

This 360-degree animation and sonification tracks humanity's discovery of the planets beyond our solar system over time.

This infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope tells astronomers that a distant gas planet, a so-called "hot Jupiter" called HD 189733b, might be smothered with high clouds. It is one of th...

Kepler arriving at the Kennedy Space Center.

This slide illustrates how scientists use Spectroscopy to determine what substances are present in the atmosphere of a celestial body.

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.

A possible newfound planet spins through a clearing in a nearby star's dusty, planet-forming disc.

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

Astronomers have discovered one of the most distant planets known, a gas giant about 13,000 light-years from Earth, called OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L. The planet was discovered using a technique called mi...

The flower you see in this picture 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 fr...

Depiction of a world completely covered with ocean.

A team of researchers has devised a way to measure the internal properties of stars—a method that offers more accurate assessments of their orbiting planets.

The conception illustration depicts how solar pressure can be used to balance NASA's Kepler spacecraft, keeping the telescope stable enough to continue monitoring distant stars in search of transit...

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...

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 without dissolves.

This artist's animation shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury.

This artist's concept shows what the weather might look like on cool star-like bodies known as brown dwarfs. These giant balls of gas start life like stars, but lack the mass to sustain nuclear fus...

For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent st...

Volunteers using DiskDetective, a NASA-sponsored citizen science website to find potential planetary nurseries, have made 1 million classifications in less than a year. Goddard astrophysicist Marc ...