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By NASA
6 min read
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It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. NASA/JPL-Caltech The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found.
The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no single planet is considered the 6,000th entry. The number is monitored by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI), based at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California. There are more than 8,000 additional candidate planets awaiting confirmation, with NASA leading the world in searching for life in the universe.
See NASA's Exoplanet Discoveries Dashboard “This milestone represents decades of cosmic exploration driven by NASA space telescopes — exploration that has completely changed the way humanity views the night sky,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Step by step, from discovery to characterization, NASA missions have built the foundation to answering a fundamental question: Are we alone? Now, with our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory, America will lead the next giant leap — studying worlds like our own around stars like our Sun. This is American ingenuity, and a promise of discovery that unites us all.”
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) throughout the galaxy. Most can be studied only indirectly, but scientists know they vary widely, as depicted in this artist’s concept, from small, rocky worlds and gas giants to water-rich planets and those as hot as stars. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The milestone comes 30 years after the first exoplanet was discovered around a star similar to our Sun, in 1995. (Prior to that, a few planets had been identified around stars that had burned all their fuel and collapsed.) Although researchers think there are billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, finding them remains a challenge. In addition to discovering many individual planets with fascinating characteristics as the total number of known exoplanets climbs, scientists are able to see how the general planet population compares to the planets of our own solar system.
For example, while our solar system hosts an equal number of rocky and giant planets, rocky planets appear to be more common in the universe. Researchers have also found a range of planets entirely different from those in our solar system. There are Jupiter-size planets that orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury orbits the Sun; planets that orbit two stars, no stars, and dead stars; planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemstones.
“Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them,” said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), located at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If we want to find out if we’re alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential.”
Searching for other worlds
Fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged, because most planets are so faint they get lost in the light from their parent star. The other four methods of planet detection are indirect. With the transit method, for instance, astronomers look for a star to dim for a short period as an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
To account for the possibility that something other than an exoplanet is responsible for a particular signal, most exoplanet candidates must be confirmed by follow-up observations, often using an additional telescope, and that takes time. That’s why there is a long list of candidates in the NASA Exoplanet Archive (hosted by NExScI) waiting to be confirmed.
“We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates,” said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. “A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets.”
The rate of exoplanet discoveries has accelerated in recent years (the database reached 5,000 confirmed exoplanets just three years ago), and this trend seems likely to continue. Kesseli and her colleagues anticipate receiving thousands of additional exoplanet candidates from the ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia mission, which finds planets through a technique called astrometry, and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will discover thousands of new exoplanets primarily through a technique called gravitational microlensing.
Many telescopes contribute to the search for and study of exoplanets, including some in space (artists concepts shown here) and on the ground. Doing the work are organizations around the world, including ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and NSF (National Science Foundation). NASA/JPL-Caltech Future exoplanets
At NASA, the future of exoplanet science will emphasize finding rocky planets similar to Earth and studying their atmospheres for biosignatures — any characteristic, element, molecule, substance, or feature that can be used as evidence of past or present life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has already analyzed the chemistry of over 100 exoplanet atmospheres.
But studying the atmospheres of planets the size and temperature of Earth will require new technology. Specifically, scientists need better tools to block the glare of the star a planet orbits. And in the case of an Earth-like planet, the glare would be significant: The Sun is about 10 billion times brighter than Earth — which would be more than enough to drown out our home planet’s light if viewed by a distant observer.
NASA has two main initiatives to try overcoming this hurdle. The Roman telescope will carry a technology demonstration instrument called the Roman Coronagraph that will test new technologies for blocking starlight and making faint planets visible. At its peak performance, the coronagraph should be able to directly image a planet the size and temperature of Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun, and at a similar distance from that star. With its microlensing survey and coronagraphic observations, Roman will reveal new details about the diversity of planetary systems, showing how common solar systems like our own may be across the galaxy.
Additional advances in coronagraph technology will be needed to build a coronagraph that can detect a planet like Earth. NASA is working on a concept for such a mission, currently named the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
More about ExEP, NExScI
NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program is responsible for implementing the agency’s plans for the discovery and understanding of planetary systems around nearby stars. It acts as a focal point for exoplanet science and technology and integrates cohesive strategies for future discoveries. The science operations and analysis center for ExEP is NExScI, based at IPAC, a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
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News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 Related Terms
Exoplanets Exoplanet Discoveries Gas Giant Exoplanets Jet Propulsion Laboratory Kepler / K2 Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Neptune-Like Exoplanets Super-Earth Exoplanets Terrestrial Exoplanets TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) The Search for Life Explore More
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By European Space Agency
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.
This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.
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By NASA
For the first time, scientists can observe temperature changes in the Sun’s outer atmosphere thanks to new technology introduced by NASA’s CODEX instrument. This animated, color-coded heat map shows temperature changes over the course of a couple days, where red indicates hotter regions and purple indicates cooler ones. NASA/KASI/INAF/CODEX Key Points:
NASA’s CODEX investigation captured images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, showcasing new aspects of its gusty, uneven flow. The CODEX instrument, located on the International Space Station, is a coronagraph — a scientific tool that creates an artificial eclipse with physical disks — that measures the speed and temperature of solar wind using special filters. These first-of-their-kind measurements will help scientists improve models of space weather and better understand the Sun’s impact on Earth. Scientists analyzing data from NASA’s CODEX (Coronal Diagnostic Experiment) investigation have successfully evaluated the instrument’s first images, revealing the speed and temperature of material flowing out from the Sun. These images, shared at a press event Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, illustrate the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is not a homogenous, steady flow of material, but an area with sputtering gusts of hot plasma. These images will help scientists improve their understanding of how the Sun impacts Earth and our technology in space.
“We really never had the ability to do this kind of science before,” said Jeffrey Newmark, a heliophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the principal investigator for CODEX. “The right kind of filters, the right size instrumentation — all the right things fell into place. These are brand new observations that have never been seen before, and we think there’s a lot of really interesting science to be done with it.”
The Sun continuously radiates material in the form of the solar wind. The Sun’s magnetic field shapes this material, sometimes creating flowing, ray-like formations called coronal streamers. In this view from NASA’s CODEX instrument, large dark spots block much of the bright light from the Sun. Blocking this light allows the instrument’s sensitive equipment to capture the faint light of the Sun’s outer atmosphere. NASA/KASI/INAF/CODEX NASA’s CODEX is a solar coronagraph, an instrument often employed to study the Sun’s faint corona, or outer atmosphere, by blocking the bright face of the Sun. The instrument, which is installed on the International Space Station, creates artificial eclipses using a series of circular pieces of material called occulting disks at the end of a long telescope-like tube. The occulting disks are about the size of a tennis ball and are held in place by three metal arms.
Scientists often use coronagraphs to study visible light from the corona, revealing dynamic features, such as solar storms, that shape the weather in space, potentially impacting Earth and beyond.
NASA missions use coronagraphs to study the Sun in various ways, but that doesn’t mean they all see the same thing. Coronagraphs on the joint NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission look at visible light from the solar corona with both a wide field of view and a smaller one. The CODEX instrument’s field of view is somewhere in the middle, but looks at blue light to understand temperature and speed variations in the background solar wind.
In this composite image of overlapping solar observations, the center and left panels show the field-of-view coverage of the different coronagraphs with overlays and are labeled with observation ranges in solar radii. The third panel shows a zoomed-in, color-coded portion of the larger CODEX image. It highlights the temperature ratios in that portion of the solar corona using CODEX 405.0 and 393.5 nm filters. NASA/ESA/SOHO/KASI/INAF/CODEX “The CODEX instrument is doing something new,” said Newmark. “Previous coronagraph experiments have measured the density of material in the corona, but CODEX is measuring the temperature and speed of material in the slowly varying solar wind flowing out from the Sun.”
These new measurements allow scientists to better characterize the energy at the source of the solar wind.
The CODEX instrument uses four narrow-band filters — two for temperature and two for speed — to capture solar wind data. “By comparing the brightness of the images in each of these filters, we can tell the temperature and speed of the coronal solar wind,” said Newmark.
Understanding the speed and temperature of the solar wind helps scientists build a more accurate picture of the Sun, which is necessary for modeling and predicting the Sun’s behaviors.
“The CODEX instrument will impact space weather modeling by providing constraints for modelers to use in the future,” said Newmark. “We’re excited for what’s to come.”
by NASA Science Editorial Team
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md
CODEX is a collaboration between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) with additional contribution from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
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Last Updated Jun 10, 2025 Related Terms
Heliophysics Coronagraph Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Division Space Weather The Sun The Sun & Solar Physics View the full article
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By NASA
Explore This Section Exoplanets Home Exoplanets Overview Exoplanets Facts Types of Exoplanets Stars What is the Universe Search for Life The Big Questions Are We Alone? Can We Find Life? The Habitable Zone Why We Search Target Star Catalog Discoveries Discoveries Dashboard How We Find and Characterize Missions People Exoplanet Catalog Immersive The Exoplaneteers Exoplanet Travel Bureau 5 Ways to Find a Planet Strange New Worlds Universe of Monsters Galaxy of Horrors News Stories Blog Resources Get Involved Glossary Eyes on Exoplanets Exoplanet Watch More Multimedia ExEP This artist’s concept pictures the planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, as seen from close to the surface of one of them. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The Discovery
Four rocky planets much smaller than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest to ours after the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Barnard’s is the nearest single star.
Key Facts
Barnard’s Star, six light-years away, is notorious among astronomers for a history of false planet detections. But with the help of high-precision technology, the latest discovery — a family of four — appears to be solidly confirmed. The tiny size of the planets is also remarkable: Capturing evidence of small worlds at great distance is a tall order, even using state-of-the-art instruments and observational techniques.
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Watching for wobbles in the light from a star is one of the leading methods for detecting exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. This “radial velocity” technique tracks subtle shifts in the spectrum of starlight caused by the gravity of a planet pulling its star back and forth as the planet orbits. But tiny planets pose a major challenge: the smaller the planet, the smaller the pull. These four are each between about a fifth and a third as massive as Earth. Stars also are known to jitter and quake, creating background “noise” that potentially could swamp the comparatively quiet signals from smaller, orbiting worlds.
Astronomers measure the back-and-forth shifting of starlight in meters per second; in this case the radial velocity signals from all four planets amount to faint whispers — from 0.2 to 0.5 meters per second (a person walks at about 1 meter per second). But the noise from stellar activity is nearly 10 times larger at roughly 2 meters per second.
How to separate planet signals from stellar noise? The astronomers made detailed mathematical models of Barnard’s Star’s quakes and jitters, allowing them to recognize and remove those signals from the data collected from the star.
The new paper confirming the four tiny worlds — labeled b, c, d, and e — relies on data from MAROON-X, an “extreme precision” radial velocity instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope on the Maunakea mountaintop in Hawaii. It confirms the detection of the “b” planet, made with previous data from ESPRESSO, a radial velocity instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. And the new work reveals three new sibling planets in the same system.
Fun Facts
These planets orbit their red-dwarf star much too closely to be habitable. The closest planet’s “year” lasts a little more than two days; for the farthest planet, it’s is just shy of seven days. That likely makes them too hot to support life. Yet their detection bodes well in the search for life beyond Earth. Scientists say small, rocky planets like ours are probably the best places to look for evidence of life as we know it. But so far they’ve been the most difficult to detect and characterize. High-precision radial velocity measurements, combined with more sharply focused techniques for extracting data, could open new windows into habitable, potentially life-bearing worlds.
Barnard’s star was discovered in 1916 by Edward Emerson Barnard, a pioneering astrophotographer.
The Discoverers
An international team of scientists led by Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago published their paper on the discovery, “Four Sub-Earth Planets Orbiting Barnard’s Star from MAROON-X and ESPRESSO,” in the science journal, “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” in March 2025. The planets were entered into the NASA Exoplanet Archive on March 13, 2025.
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Last Updated Apr 01, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Explore This Section Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 3 min read
Visiting Mars on the Way to the Outer Solar System
Written by Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator, SuperCam instrument / Co-Investigator, SHERLOC instrument at Purdue University
A portion of the “Sally’s Cove” outcrop where the Perseverance rover has been exploring. The radiating lines in the rock on the left of the image may indicate that it is a shatter cone, showing the effects of the shock wave from a nearby large impact. The image was taken by Mastcam-Z’s left camera on March 21, 2025 (Sol 1452, or Martian day 1,452 of the Mars 2020 mission) at the local mean solar time of 12:13:44. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. This image was voted by the public as “Image of the week.” NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU Recently Mars has had a few Earthly visitors. On March 1, NASA’s Europa Clipper flew within 550 miles (884 kilometers) of the Red Planet’s surface on its way out to Jupiter. On March 12, the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft flew within about 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) of Mars, and only 300 kilometers from its moon, Deimos. Hera is on its way to study the binary asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos. Next year, in May 2026, NASA’s Psyche mission is scheduled to buzz the Red Planet on its way to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche, coming within a few thousand kilometers.
Why all these visits to Mars? You might at first think that they’re using Mars as an object of opportunity for their cameras, and you would be partially right. But Mars has more to give these missions than that. The main reason for these flybys is the extra speed that Mars’ velocity around the Sun can give them. The idea that visiting a planet can speed up a spacecraft is not all that obvious, because the same gravity that attracts the spacecraft on its way towards the planet will exert a backwards force as the spacecraft leaves the planet.
The key is in the direction that it approaches and leaves the planet. If the spacecraft leaves Mars heading in the direction that Mars is traveling around the Sun, it will gain speed in that direction, slingshotting it farther into the outer solar system. A spacecraft can typically gain several percent of its speed by performing such a slingshot flyby. The closer it gets to the planet, the bigger the effect. However, no mission wants to be slowed by the upper atmosphere, so several hundred kilometers is the closest that a mission should go. And the proximity to the planet is also affected by the exact direction the spacecraft needs to go when it leaves Mars.
Clipper’s Mars flyby was a slight exception, slowing down the craft — by about 1.2 miles per second (2 kilometers per second) — to steer it toward Earth for a second gravity assist in December 2026. That will push the spacecraft the rest of the way to Jupiter, for its 2030 arrival.
While observing Mars is not the main reason for their visits, many of the visiting spacecraft take the opportunity to use their cameras either to perform calibrations or to study the Red Planet and its moons.
During Clipper’s flyby over sols 1431-1432, Mastcam-Z was directed to watch the skies for signs of the interplanetary visitor. Clipper’s relatively large solar panels could have reflected enough sunlight for it to be seen in the Mars night sky, much as we can see satellites overhead from Earth. Unfortunately, the spacecraft entered the shadow of Mars just before it came into potential view above the horizon from Perseverance’s vantage point, so the sighting did not happen. But it was worth a try.
Meanwhile, back on the ground, Perseverance is performing something of a cliff-hanger. “Sally’s Cove” is a relatively steep rock outcrop in the outer portion of Jezero crater’s rim just north of “Broom Hill.” Perseverance made an approach during March 19-23, and has been exploring some dark-colored rocks along this outcrop, leaving the spherules behind for the moment. Who knows what Perseverance will find next?
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Last Updated Mar 28, 2025 Related Terms
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