The first planet to have its clouds mapped showed us what weather looked like on a planet outside our solar system.

The first exoplanet discovered around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b made us question what we knew of our universe and launched the search for new worlds.

This infographic explains how NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope can be used in tandem with a telescope on the ground to measure the distances to planets discovered using the "microlensing" technique.

This animation shows the first-ever map of the surface of an exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system.

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.

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...

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...

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.

Astronomers can detect the presence of disks of dust orbiting distant stars by measuring how the combined light from the star and disk changes across different wavelengths.

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.

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...

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. ...

The sweep of NASA Kepler mission’s search for small, habitable planets in the last six years.

On August 25, 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to reveal secrets of the infrared universe.

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

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.

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

Video of the Kepler spacecraft launch from March 2009.

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 ...

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

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...

Up-close picture of Kepler CCD hardware.

A dusty planetary system (left) is compared to another system with little dust in this artist concept. Dust can make it difficult for telescopes to image planets because light from the dust can out...

Planets having atmospheres rich in helium may be common in our galaxy, according to a new theory based on data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These planets would be around the mass of Neptune...

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.