Skip Navigation
menu close modal

Multimedia

Twenty Years of Progress

Twenty Years of Progress

This shows the first planet to be confirmed as an exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, and the newest Earth-sized planet confirmed.

Credit

NASA Ames/W. Stenzel

ENLARGE

Related

Observed transit depths and theoretical models for GJ 1214 b
More
Observed transit for GJ 1214 b
Observed transit for GJ 1214 b
This artist's concept depicts an itsy bitsy planetary system -- so compact, in fact, that it's more like Jupiter and its moons than a star and its planets.
More
Kepler's Mini Planetary System
Kepler's Mini Planetary System
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...
More
Highlighting our Tiniest Neighbors
Highlighting our Tiniest Neighbors
Spitzer Mission Manager Joseph Hunt stands in Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Jan. 30, 2020, declaring the spacecraft decommissioned and the Spitzer ...
More
Men and women applauding in mission control as Spitzer's mission is declared over.
Spitzer Mission Manager Declares End of Mission
Like Luke Skywalker's planet "Tatooine" in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Kepler-16b is a gas giant like Saturn, so it has no solid surface to stand on. The view here is depicted on ...
More
Kepler-16b
Where your shadow always has company
This graph shows the brightness variations of the brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026 measured simultaneously by both NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
More
Probing Brown Dwarf Layers
Probing Brown Dwarf Layers
Audience: 5th grade and older Observed exoplanets are very hot, so much so that many common metals would melt.
More
This slides illustrates that observed exoplanets are very hot, so much so that many common metals would melt.
Comparison of Metal Phases on Exoplanets - Quiz
During 9.6 years in orbit, the Kepler space telescope observed more than half a million stars and discovered more than 2,600 planets. See the mission by the numbers.
More
Kepler was in orbit 9.6 years, used 3.12 gallons of fuel, observed 530,506 stars and led to the discovery of 2,662 planets.
NASA's Kepler Mission By the Numbers
This plot compares the colors of solar system planets to the color of the hot-Jupiter-class planet HD 189733b.
More
Visible-light Color of Planets Plot
Visible-light Color of Planets Plot
This artists impression shows the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9. This is the closest such object to the Solar System.
More
Artists impression of the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9
Artists impression of the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9
A newly discovered exoplanet, Kepler-452b, takes us closer than ever to finding a planet that looks like our own. This super-Earth is 60% larger than our home world, but its year is only 20 days lo...
More
What if there is some place like home?
What if there is some place like home?
This image captured by the SOFI instrument on ESOs New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory shows the free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 in infrared light.
More
The free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 (annotated)
The free-floating planet CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9 (annotated)
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star like our sun, approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.
More
A Tiny Planet (Artist's Concept)
A Tiny Planet (Artist's Concept)
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.
More
The Invisible Disk
The Invisible Disk
The telescope studied comets and asteroids, counted stars, scrutinized planets and galaxies, and discovered soccer-ball-shaped carbon spheres in space called buckyballs.
More
Spitzer Space Telescope
Spitzer Space Telescope
Add your own creative vision to the coloring page based on our popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster for HD 40307 g. Do you picture a rocky planet or one shrouded in gas and ice? 
More
A coloring page based on our popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster for HD 40307 g that shows the effects of super gravity as a skydiver descends over the planet.
HD 40307 g Coloring Page
These computer-generated images chart the development of severe weather patterns on the highly eccentric exoplanet HD 80606b during the days after its closest approach to its parent star.
More
Severe Exoplanetary Storm
Severe Exoplanetary Storm
In the three and a half years of its primary mission, NASA's Kepler spacecraft produced a mountain of data. Astronomers continue to mine it, finding new likely planets all the time - including Kepl...
More
Getting Closer to Another Earth: Kepler's 4500+ Planet Candidates
Getting Closer to Another Earth: Kepler's 4500+ Planet Candidates
The first exoplanet directly imaged was 2M1207 b. Itt was also the first planet found orbiting a brown dwarf. A composite image by ESO's VLT (Very Large Telescope) reveals the exoplanet orbiting th...
More
2M1207b - First image of an exoplanet
2M1207 b - First image of an exoplanet
This is a temperature map of the "hot Jupiter" class exoplanet WASP 43b. The white-colored region on the daytime side is 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The nighttime side temperatures drop to under 1,00...
More
NASA Hubble Maps the Temperature and Water Vapor on an Extreme Exoplanet
NASA Hubble Maps the Temperature and Water Vapor on an Extreme Exoplanet
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have taken the first ever image of the snow line in an infant planetary system.
More
TW Hydrae snow line distance compared to the Solar System
TW Hydrae snow line distance compared to the Solar System
The flower you see in this picture 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 fr...
More
Flower power: NASA starshade petal prototype
Flower power: NASA starshade petal prototype
Estos tres mundos condenados estuvieron entre los primeros y más espeluznantes que se descubrieron mientras orbitaban su estrella no-muerta, conocida como un púlsar.
More
A poster done in the style of movie posters from the 1950s and 1960s showing the zombie worlds with a colorful nebula and a planet being blasted by twin beams of radiation by the pulsar host star. The overall image creates the look of a scary skull.
Mundos Zombis
Transit data are rich with information. By measuring the depth of the dip in brightness and knowing the size of the star, scientists can determine the size or radius of the planet. The orbital peri...
More
Light Curve of a Planet Transiting Its Star
Light Curve of a Planet Transiting Its Star
A series of images of a distant gas giant reveal its orbit around its star Beta Pictoris, located some 60 light-years from Earth.
More
Gemini Planet Imager shows darting exoplanet
Gemini Planet Imager shows darting exoplanet

Explore Alien Worlds

Exoplanet Travel Bureau

This set of travel posters envision a day when the creativity of scientists and engineers will allow us to do things we can only dream of now.
More

Strange New Worlds

Explore an interactive gallery of some of the most intriguing and exotic planets discovered so far.
More
A planetary tour through time. The ancients debated the existence of planets beyond our own; now we know of thousands.

Historic Timeline

A planetary tour through time. The ancients debated the existence of planets beyond our own; now we know of thousands.
More