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...

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

A furled model of the first starshade built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is shown in an Astro Aerospace/Northrup Grumman facility in Santa Barbara, California in 2013.

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...

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).

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

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...

Using NASA’s Hubble Telescope, scientists detected a stratosphere on the planet WASP-33b. A stratosphere occurs when molecules in the atmosphere absorb ultraviolet and visible light from the star. ...

This is the animated storybook tale of the Spitzer spacecraft and its exploits as part of the space telescope superteam known as NASA’s Great Observatories, which also includes Hubble, Chandra and ...

Jupiter-size exoplanets orbiting close to their stars have upended ideas about how giant planets form. Finding young members of this planet class could help answer key questions.

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.

Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity. 

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...

The Kepler spacecraft, responsible for thousands of new potential disoveries.

Weighing in at 11 times Jupiter’s mass and orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-Sun distance, planet HD 106906 b is unlike anything in our own Solar System and throws a wrench in planet...

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...

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.

Astronomers can detect the presence of disks of dust orbiting distant stars by measuring how the combined light from the star and disk changes across different wavelengths.

Kepler does not orbit the Earth, rather it orbits the Sun in concert with the Earth, slowly drifting away from Earth. Every 61 Earth years, Kepler and Earth will pass by each other.

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 ...

This slide compares the Kepler Space Telescope to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope.

HD 80606b is a gas giant planet in an eccentric orbit around its star. Every 111 days, the planet passes within 2.8 million miles of the star's surface. Animated with dissolves between frames.

This slide explains the transit method for exoplanet detection.

Artistic rendering of a planet's transmission spectrum

Watch what happens in the life of a star and its planets. This version of the video has no text overlays.