Over 6,000 worlds confirmed orbiting other stars — lava planets, diamond planets, planets with two suns, and a few that sit exactly where life could start. You're looking at the greatest treasure map in human history.
Pick a world. The holo-projector rebuilds it in 3D — drag to spin it, crank the rotation, and read its full dossier. Every planet below is real, confirmed, and catalogued by NASA.
The weirdest, hottest, coldest, and most Earth-like planets we've ever found. Filter by class, search by name, and tap any world to open its dossier — or load it straight into the 3D explorer.
Not too hot. Not too cold. The habitable zone is the ring around a star where a rocky planet can hold liquid water on its surface — the single best clue we have for finding life. Earth sits in the sweet spot. So do Proxima Centauri b, TRAPPIST-1e, and Kepler-186f.
Around small, cool red-dwarf stars the zone sits much closer in — which is why so many of the most promising worlds, like the TRAPPIST-1 system just 39 light-years away, orbit tiny red suns.
You can't just point a camera — these planets are trillions of miles away, drowned in their star's glare. So astronomers hunt shadows, wobbles, and bent light.
A planet crosses its star and the starlight dips — by as little as 1%. Kepler and TESS watch hundreds of thousands of stars for that blink, on repeat.
A planet's gravity tugs its star in a tiny circle. That wobble shifts the star's light red, then blue — a fingerprint precise enough to weigh a world.
The hardest trick: block the star's light with a coronagraph and photograph the planet itself — a pale dot a billion times fainter than its sun.
Wolszczan & Frail find planets orbiting a pulsar, the spinning corpse of an exploded star. The last place anyone expected planets — and proof they could exist almost anywhere.
Mayor & Queloz find a Jupiter-sized planet whipping around a sun-like star in just 4 days. It wins the Nobel Prize and launches the modern planet hunt.
NASA's Kepler telescope confirms 2,600+ planets in one patch of sky and proves planets outnumber stars. Statistically, every star you see tonight has worlds.
An Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of the closest star to the Sun, just 4.24 light-years away. Close enough that a probe launched this century could reach it.
Seven Earth-sized planets around a single red dwarf — at least three in the habitable zone. The whole system would fit inside Mercury's orbit.
The James Webb Space Telescope begins reading the air of alien worlds molecule by molecule — water, CO₂, methane — hunting the chemistry of life itself.
NASA's confirmed count passes 6,000. The archive you're browsing now is the year-3000 edition — by then, this list is ancient history.