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.

Cluster of Stars in Kepler's Sight - This image zooms into a small portion of Kepler's full field of view -- an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in our Milky Way galaxy.

The graphic tells NASA's Kepler spacecraft's story by the numbers from the moment it began hunting for planets outside our solar system on May 12, 2009.

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

An animation depicting various orbit geometries, some of which permit view of transits, and others that do not.

This image from the NACO system on ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows a candidate protoplanet in the disc of gas and dust around the young star HD100546.

An animation of an imagined Earth-sized exoplanet.

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.

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

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...

Planets having atmospheres rich in helium may be common in our galaxy, according to a new theory based on data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These planets would be around the mass of Neptune...

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...

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).

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.

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.

Artistic rendering of a planet's transmission spectrum

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

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 slide explains and illustrates what a "habitable zone" is, and how it would change based on the size of the host star.

Over its ten years in space, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier tool for studying exoplanets.

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...

Kepler is launched at night (10:48 PM EST) on a Delta 2 expendable launch vehicle.

Twenty years ago astronomers discovered the first planet around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b. This is the story of the pioneers in planet-hunting and how those who have followed are now poised to a...

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