A possible newfound planet spins through a clearing in a nearby star's dusty, planet-forming disc.

Animation of Kepler spacecraft slowly rotating in space.

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...

The New Mexico Exoplanet Spectroscopic Survey Instrument (NESSI) will soon get its first "taste" of exoplanets, helping astronomers decipher their chemical composition.

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

A unique feature of the seventh Kepler candidate catalog is that it is the first to fully automate the assessment of transit-like signals. The total height of each bar shows the total number of Kep...

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...

The Kepler space telescope will remain for decades in orbit around the Sun, weaving in and out of Earth’s orbital path.

ESO’s VLT identified our Sun's oldest twin and provides new clues about stars that may host terrestrial rocky planets.

Transit data are rich with information. By measuring the depth of the dip in brightness and knowing the size of the star, scientists can determine the size or radius of the planet. The orbital peri...

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...

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

This episode of "Hubble at 25" uncovers Hubble's Key role in the study of planets beyond our solar system.

Ball Aerospace team assembles Kepler spacecraft

The first Earth-size planet discovered around a near solar twin, the discovery of Kepler-452b brings us closer than ever to finding an Earth-like planet.

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

Lurking beyond our solar system, among the billions of stars and the exoplanets that orbit them, is another sort of Milky Way altogether. Our "Galaxy of Horrors" reveals the sinister science behind...

NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

These plots from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show light from a distant planet, GJ 436b, and its star, as measured at six different infrared wavelengths.

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).

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...

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.

The Kepler mission found 1,284 new planets via the transit method. When a planet passes directly between its star and an observer, it dims the star's light by a measurable amount.

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

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.