Observed transit depths and theoretical models for GJ 1214 b

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...

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 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...

This artist's concept shows how astronomers use the unique orbit of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and a depth-perceiving trick called parallax to determine the distance of dark planets, black hole...

These slides compare the density and illumination of planets in our Solar System with those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Learn more about how to use the basic functions of Eyes on Exoplanets

Light from a distant star is bent and focused by gravity as a planet passes between the star and Earth.

Once the third stage finishes its work, Kepler will have sufficient energy to leave the gravitational pull of Earth and go into orbit around the Sun, trailing behind Earth and slowly drifting away ...

The first Earth-size planet discovered around a near solar twin, the discovery of Kepler-452b brings us closer than ever to finding an Earth-like planet.

This is an artist's concept of a hypothetical 10-million-year-old star system. The bright blur at the center is a star much like our sun. The other orb in the image is a gas-giant planet like Jupit...

This graph shows the brightness variations of the brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026 measured simultaneously by both NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.

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...

During the four years of science operations, the pointing precision of the spacecraft was controlled to within a few milli-arcseconds. That is the equivalent of keeping your gaze steady on a grain ...

First light image from two of the CCD modules of the Kepler mission.

Spitzer Mission Manager Joseph Hunt stands in Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Jan. 30, 2020, declaring the spacecraft decommissioned and the Spitzer ...

This image from NASA's Kepler mission shows the telescope's full field of view -- an expansive star-rich patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

Audience: 3rd grade and older This slide shows the difference in temperature between planets orbiting an M Dwarf star and our Sun. The second view shows their relative distance from their star.

Our Sun is just one out of over 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun is located in the Orion arm of our galaxy about 25,000 light years from the center of the Galaxy. Kepler will...

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

This slide explains and illustrates what a "habitable zone" is, and how it would change based on the size of the host star.

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 ...

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 image shows the HR 8799 planets with starlight optically suppressed and data processing conducted to remove residual starlight. The star is at the center of the blackened circle in the image. ...

This artist's animation flies through the Kepler-20 star system, where NASA's Kepler mission discovered the first Earth-size planets around a star beyond our own. The system is jam-packed with five...