The Kepler photometer is lowered onto the spacecraft in a clean room.

Observed transit depths and theoretical models for GJ 1214 b

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

Audience: 3rd grade and older  This slide shows how dramatically different the planets in our solar system are in size.

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

How do we explore worlds beyond our own? (Downloadable fact sheet)

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 ...

Depiction of a world completely covered with ocean.

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

Inverted image (dark stars on light sky) Stars in the image are all brighter than magnitude 18.5. Stars brighter than 11.5 are "saturated" (all look the same brightness in the image).

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 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...

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...

Exoplanets can be pretty weird places, but do their names have to be so weird, too? Watch and learn how the scientific community determines and categorizes these unique planets.

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

A list of current and future missions that have a role in searching for new worlds.

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...

The telescope studied comets and asteroids, counted stars, scrutinized planets and galaxies, and discovered soccer-ball-shaped carbon spheres in space called buckyballs.

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 ...

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 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...

If life exists on some of the exoplanets that Kepler finds, it may exist in forms similar to what we see in some of Earth's most extreme conditions.

This slide explains some of the history of exoplanet detection over the last 30+ years.

Audience: 3rd grade and older This slide introduces four major space telescopes that are contributing to our study of exoplanets: Hubble, Kepler/K2, Tess, and James Webb.

This artist's concept shows planet KELT-9b orbiting its host star, KELT-9. It is the hottest gas giant planet discovered so far.