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...

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

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...

The analysis of the first three years of Kepler data have revealed more than 3,600 candidate worlds. The diagram plots the planet candidates by oribtal period on the x-axis and size relative to Ear...

The first exoplanet discovered around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b made us question what we knew of our universe and launched the search for new worlds.

This graph shows the brightness variations of the brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026 measured simultaneously by both NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.

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.

A dusty planetary system (left) is compared to another system with little dust in this artist concept. Dust can make it difficult for telescopes to image planets because light from the dust can out...

Audience: 5th grade and older (introduces Kelvin) This slide shows the difference in temperature between planets orbiting an M Dwarf star and our Sun. The second view shows their relative distan...

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.

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.

Animation of Kepler spacecraft slowly rotating in space.

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

This artist's animation shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury.

Of the more than 1,000 verified planets found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, eight are less than twice Earth-size and in their stars' habitable zone. All eight orbit stars cooler and smaller tha...

Exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – are everywhere. At NASA, we're studying exoplanets to learn all about their weirdness, their variety, and all the fascinating things they can tell us...

Once the third stage finishes its work, Kepler will have sufficient energy to leave the gravitational pull of Earth and go into orbit around the Sun, trailing behind Earth and slowly drifting away ...

The flower you see in this animation isn’t NASA’s attempt to celebrate the coming of spring. It’s actually the latest design in a cutting-edge effort to take pictures of planets orbiting stars far ...

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

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

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

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

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 ...

Researchers have detected the first "exomoon" candidate -- a moon orbiting a planet that lies outside our solar system. Using a technique called "microlensing," they observed what could be either a...