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

This artist's concept shows the closest known planetary system to our own-Epsilon Eridani. Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show that the system hosts two asteroid belts, in additio...

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.

Astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting plan...

Ball Aerospace team assembles Kepler spacecraft

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.

Animation of HAT-P-7 light curve with magnified y-axis to better show the occultation dip in brightness. When the planet passes behind the star, light that is reflecting off the planet from the sta...

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.

Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler science team put together a visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February of 2011.

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

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.

This plot compares the colors of solar system planets to the color of the hot-Jupiter-class planet HD 189733b.

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 ...

This artist's concept depicts a planetary system discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan in 1992 around a pulsar.

Video feature describing the process and implications of the planetary color analysis.

This diagram shows how astronomers observed a distant gas giant planet around OGLE-2005-BLG-169 using microlensing.

This image shows our own back yard, astronomically speaking, from a vantage point about 30 light-years away from the sun. It highlights the population of tiny brown dwarfs recently discovered by NA...

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 ...

This image shows our own back yard, astronomically speaking, from a vantage point about 30 light-years away from the sun. It highlights the population of tiny brown dwarfs recently discovered by NA...

The habitable zone is the distance from a star where one can have liquid water on the surface of a planet. If a planet is too close to its parent star, it will be too hot and water would have evapo...

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...

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...

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

This slide explains some of the main differences between black holes and planets. 

The first extra-solar planet detected around a star similar to the Sun was 51 Peg. It has about the mass of Jupiter. But unlike Jupiter, which is five times as far from the Sun as Earth and orbits ...