Audience: 3rd grade and older This slide shows how far the planets are from their respective stars and how that influences how hot they are.

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star that may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity.

This illustration shows three possible scenarios for the evolution of asteroid belts.

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.

The artistic impression shows NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2.

This image from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows the newly discovered planet HD95086 b, next to its parent star.

When we describe different types of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – what do we mean by "hot Jupiters," "warm Neptunes," and "super-Earths"? 

This illustration shows the unusual orbit of planet Kepler-413b around a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars. The planet's 66-day orbit is tilted 2.5 degrees with respect to the plane of the b...

Every star has a habitable zone, but where that zone lies is different for stars of different sizes and brightness.

Audience: 3rd grade and older This slides shows that some exoplanets are in the so-called "habitable zone."

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...

There is only one planet we know of so far that is teeming with life–– Earth. If we want to find life on other planets, we start with the ingredients we know at home.

A graphic of present and future exoplanet missions from space agencies and observatories around the world.

There are water worlds, lava planets, egg-shaped worlds, planets with multiple suns, and even planets with no sun at all! What can we learn from this weird, wondrous variety?

This artist's concept shows a Jupiter-like planet, called Upsilon Andromedae b, soaking up the scorching rays of its nearby star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope determined that this planet is two-f...

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 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 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 artist's concept shows what a fiery hot star and its close-knit planetary companion might look close up if viewed in visible (left) and infrared light.

Like ancient explorers who looked to the stars to guide them to new worlds, astronomers today use stars to discover worlds many light years beyond our solar system. By studying stars and their uniq...

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 ...

The top graph consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. It tells astronomers that a distant planet, called Upsilon Andromedae b, always has a giant hot spot on the side that fa...

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity. 

Audience: 3rd grade and older This slide compares the difference in size between planets in our solar system and with three kinds of exoplanets: Super Earth,  Neptunian and Gas Giants.

Kepler focal plane assembly in a clean room.