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...

Animation of the Kepler spacecraft ejecting its dust cover.

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 has discovered the first transiting circumbinary system -- multiple planets orbiting two suns -- 4,900 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, proving that more t...

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.

Observed transit depths and theoretical models for GJ 1214 b

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 ...

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

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

When a planet passes directly between a star and its observer, it dims the star's light by a measurable amount. Light curves get complicated when more planets are transiting a star. The combined li...

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.

First light image from two of the CCD modules of the Kepler mission.

Astronomers detect lowest-mass planet around a star like the sun found using direct imaging techniques.

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...

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 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...

This plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope tells astronomers that a toasty gas exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system, contains water vapor.

Animation of Kepler spacecraft slowly rotating in space.

NASA has confirmed more than 5,000 worlds beyond our solar system during 30 years of exploration. There are billions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone, so many more discoveries await.

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...

On this episode of Q&Alien, we talk about what the term "habitable zone" means - and what it doesn't.

A hypothetical planet is depicted here moving through the habitable zone and then further out into a long, cold winter.

This sculpture by Angela Palmer is created from the data gathered to date by the Kepler telescope. It literally reproduces in three dimensions the chunk of sky the Kepler telescope has been trained...

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

This slide explains the radial velocity method for exoplanet detection.