Skip Navigation

Multimedia

Kepler Full Focal Plane Image - Inverted

Kepler Full Focal Plane Image - Inverted

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).

Credit

NASA/Kepler mission

ENLARGE

Related

Exoplanet atmospheres might one day reveal the presence of life.
More
Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass
The artist's concept depicts a comet-like tail of a possible disintegrating super Mercury-size planet candidate as it transits its parent star named KIC 12557548.
More
Disintegrating Super Mercury-size Planet
Disintegrating Super Mercury-size Planet
Highlighted are 12 new planet candidates from the seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog that are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in the stars' habitable zone—the range of distances from a star where liquid water could exist on the surface of an orbiting planet.
More
Twelve New Small Kepler Habitable Zone Candidates
Twelve New Small Kepler Habitable Zone Candidates
A night test of a small-scale starshade model shows how the starshade could block bright light from telescopes.
More
A demonstration of the starshade blocking starlight.
Starshade desert testing
This artist's concept shows "The Behemoth," an enormous comet-like cloud of hydrogen bleeding off of a warm, Neptune-sized planet just 30 light-years from Earth. Also depicted is the parent star (a faint red dwarf) of expolanet GJ 436.
More
"Behemoth" Bleeding Atmosphere Around a Warm Exoplanet
"Behemoth" Bleeding Atmosphere Around a Warm Exoplanet
Artist's impression of the five-Earth mass planet, Gliese 581 c, found in the habitable zone around the red dwarf Gliese 581, with the instrument HARPS on the ESO 3.6-m telescope.
More
The Earth-like Planet Gliese 581c (Artist's Impression)
The Earth-like Planet Gliese 581c (Artist's Impression)
Five years ago today, on March 6, 2009, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope rocketed into the night skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to find planets around other stars, called exoplanets, in search of potentially habitable worlds.
More
Kepler Marks Five Years in Space
Kepler Marks Five Years in Space
Celebrate your rocking single status with a rogue planet, the world without a star.
More
Illustration of a rogue planet.
Rogue planet Valentine
An artist's concept shows a gas-giant planet orbiting very close to its parent star, creating searingly hot conditions on the planet's surface.
More
Forecasting Weather on Distant Worlds
Forecasting Weather on Distant Worlds
This artist's conception illustrates a Jupiter-like planet alone in the dark of space, floating freely without a parent star.
More
Free-Floating Planets May be More Common Than Stars
Free-Floating Planets May be More Common Than Stars
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.
More
A prototype starshade unfurling.
Starshade Deployment
The third closest star system to the sun, called WISE J104915.57-531906, is at the center of the larger image, which was taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It appeared to be a single object, but a sharper image (inset) from Gemini Observatory in Chile, revealed that it was binary star system, consisting of a pair of brown dwarfs.
More
Brown Dwarfs in our 'Backyard'
Brown Dwarfs in our 'Backyard'
Using data from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer Space Telescopes, scientists have made the most precise measurement ever of the size of a world outside our solar system, as illustrated in this artist's conception.
More
Gauging an Alien World's Size (Artist Concept)
Gauging an Alien World's Size (Artist Concept)
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, "invisible" world is tugging on it. This is the first definite detection of a previously unknown planet using this method. No other technique could have found the unseen companion.
More
An Invisible World
An Invisible World
This artist's concept depicts giant planets circling between belts of dust. Scientists think the star system HD 95068 may have a planetary architecture similar to this.
More
Hidden in a Dust Halo
Hidden in a Dust Halo
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.
More
Infographic: Profile of planet Kepler-452b
Infographic: Profile of planet Kepler-452b
If astronomers could somehow pull planets out of the sky and analyze them in the laboratory, it might look something like this artistically altered image illustrating new research from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
More
An Astronomer's Fantasy: Planets in the Lab
An Astronomer's Fantasy: Planets in the Lab
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 NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE (red circles).
More
Highlighting our Tiniest Neighbors
Highlighting our Tiniest Neighbors
This infographic explains how NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope can be used in tandem with a telescope on the ground to measure the distances to planets discovered using the "microlensing" technique.
More
Infographic: Finding Planets With Microlensing
Infographic: Finding Planets With Microlensing
The Kepler photometer is lowered onto the spacecraft in a clean room.
More
Kepler Photometer Being Lowered onto Spacecraft
Kepler Photometer Being Lowered onto Spacecraft
The sweep of NASA Kepler mission’s search for small, habitable planets in the last six years.
More
Searching for Habitable Worlds
Searching for Habitable Worlds
Celebrate Valetine's Day with a hot Jupiter that tightly hugs its star.
More
A Valentine for a Hot Jupiter
Hot Jupiter Valentine
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.
More
Star Cluster NGC 6791 from Kepler First Light Image
Star Cluster NGC 6791 from Kepler First Light Image
An artist's concept of brilliant auroras on the brown dwarf LSR J1835+3259, a misfit failed star about 18.5 light-years from Earth.
More
Brown Dwarf Aurora
Brown Dwarf Aurora
This plot shows the masses and sizes of the smallest exoplanets for which both quantities have been measured. The solar system planets (shown in red) are for comparison.
More
Mars-size Kepler-138b Gets a Mass
Mars-size Kepler-138b Gets a Mass

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