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.

When the launch vehicle has risen sufficiently above the atmosphere, the fairings protecting the Kepler spacecraft during launch are jettisoned, exposing Kepler to space for the first time.

A detailed explanation into the workings of the coronagraph and how it can help directly image exoplanets.

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...

Observed transit depths and theoretical models for GJ 1214 b

A new NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Five years ago today, on March 6, 2009, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope rocketed into the night skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to find planets around other stars, called exop...

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

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 ...

The artist's concept depicts Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation L...

For students in Grade: 3rd to 12th A set of slides designed to help teachers and Subject Matter Experts explain complex topics in a fun way.

This slide compares the Kepler Space Telescope to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope.

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

This artist's concept illustrates an icy planet-forming disk around a young star called TW Hydrae, located about 175 light-years away in the Hydra, or Sea Serpent, constellation.

This diagram illustrates how astronomers can capture the elusive spectra of hot-Jupiter planets by comparing observations including light from both the star and planet to those containing just the ...

An animation depicting various orbit geometries, some of which permit view of transits, and others that do not.

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...

A series of images of a distant gas giant reveal its orbit around its star Beta Pictoris, located some 60 light-years from Earth.

This slide illustrates why we can easily see stars in the night sky but not their planets. The slide incorporates a graphic comparison of Brightness, Size, and Weight.

This animation shows the prototype starshade, a giant structure designed to block the glare of stars so that future space telescopes can take pictures of planets. This video also includes testing o...

This slide explains the transit method for exoplanet detection.

This chart shows most of the stars visible with the unaided eye on a clear night. The star Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest stars in the southern sky (marked with a red circle). It lies just ...

This infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope called a spectrum tells astronomers that a distant gas planet, a so-called "hot Jupiter" called HD 209458b, might be smothered with high cloud...

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...

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