An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun. More than 5,800 have been confirmed since the first around a Sun-like star in 1995, ranging from scorched gas giants to rocky worlds in their stars' habitable zones. Astronomers detect them mostly by the tiny dimming as a planet transits its star, or the star's slight wobble, and increasingly characterize their atmospheres, and even their surfaces, with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Direct Imaging
Almost every planet we have imaged directly is a young, glowing furnace. Then JWST captured a mature, frigid super-Jupiter twelve light-years away, ne...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Astrobiology
In 2025, a team announced a gas in a distant world's air that, on Earth, is made almost only by living things. Then the scrutiny began, and it became ...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Magma Worlds
Thirty-five light-years away, the super-Earth L 98-59 d has no solid ground. A permanent ocean of magma feeds a sky laced with sulfur, and it may be t...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Direct Imaging
Around a bright star in Cygnus, the James Webb Space Telescope blocked the glare of the star itself and captured the faint thermal glow of a world fif...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Planet Formation
Around a young Sun-like star called WISPIT 2, astronomers have directly imaged a gas giant glowing inside a dark gap in a multi-ringed disk, and then ...
Cosmology · Exoplanets · Rogue Planets
Untethered to any star, rogue worlds may outnumber the suns of the Milky Way. Here is how astronomers find the invisible, and why one of these frozen ...