The orbit of a planet can cause a star to wobble around in space in relation to nearby stars in the sky.

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.

The star appears to blink in a pattern. It dims like clockwork as six "hands" of differing size orbit around it at different rates.

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

This graph of data from NASA's Spitzer Space telescope shows changes in the infrared light output of two star-planet systems (one above, one below) located hundreds of light-years away.

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

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

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

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 shows the HR 8799 planets with starlight optically suppressed and data processing conducted to remove residual starlight. The star is at the center of the blackened circle in the image. ...

The top graph consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. It tells astronomers that a distant planet, called Upsilon Andromedae b, always has a giant hot spot on the side that fa...

Animation of HAT-P-7 light curve showing both large transit dip and small occultation dip.

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...

An animation explaining how the hybrid Lyot coronagraph works. Watch the longer version here.

Watch the PlanetQuest interactive timeline in video format!

Kepler is launched at night on a Delta 2 expendable launch vehicle.

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...

This slide breaks down and explains what black holes are.

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

This artist's conception shows a young, hypothetical planet around a cool star. A soupy mix of potentially life-forming chemicals can be seen pooling around the base of the jagged rocks.

Learn more about how to use the basic functions of Eyes on Exoplanets

The basic chemistry for life has been detected in a second hot gas planet, HD 209458b, depicted in this artist's concept.

Kepler-10b as a scorched world, orbiting at a distance that’s more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our own Sun.

This map, the first-ever of the surface of an exoplanet, shows temperature variations across the cloudy tops of a gas giant called HD 189733b.

When a planet crosses directly between us and its star, we see the star dim slightly because the planet is blocking out a portion of the light. We can make a plot called a light curve with the brig...