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NASA Exoplanets
@nasaexoplanets.extwitter.link
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There’s a rhythm to the stars. Astronomers identified a collection of pulsating red giant stars across the sky, each with a unique tone that depends on each star’s interior structure, mass, and size. #MondayMotivation
September 29, 2025 at 6:55 PM
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Smaug isn’t the only dragon in the sky. Draco is a circumpolar constellation that’s visible in the northern sky all year! Within this constellation's hoard is the Cat’s Eye Nebula, and the Spindle and Tadpole galaxies. https://go.nasa.gov/4pyMyTB https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G1efyU8XYAAWKxk.jpg
September 22, 2025 at 8:19 PM
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Stars close to the center of our galaxy dance around what appears to be nothing at all, but is actually a black hole with the mass of 4 million Suns. #MondayMotivation
September 22, 2025 at 7:19 PM
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3, 2, 1 … blast off! 🔢

Help your little learners practice math and develop fine-motor skills with this clip counting activity. Count the space objects on each card and clip the correct number with a clothespin! https://go.nasa.gov/42Gw7uH https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G1OOQllW0Agh6os.png
September 19, 2025 at 4:23 PM
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April is #CitSciMonth and there are lots of ways to join in. Of course, we're partial to the programs where you can discover worlds, but you do you and @DoNASAScience! https://go.nasa.gov/3TX4pox
Citizen Science - NASA Science
science.nasa.gov
April 16, 2024 at 4:57 PM
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Of 5,609 confirmed exoplanets, just 200 are thought to be terrestrial – rocky worlds like Earth and Mars. Fewer still are in their stars' habitable zones. That doesn't mean they're inhabited, of course, but we're looking! https://go.nasa.gov/3Ul23RP
An artist's concept depicts the imagined view from the surface of a terrestrial exoplanet. The surface is rocky with hills or mountains on the horizon. The shy is dusky with one large star low on the horizon, with two other stars in sky, higher and farther away. It is labeled Illustration and the credit is ESO.
April 15, 2024 at 7:32 PM
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In a cosmic ballroom 1,900 light-years away, six stars are dancing in pairs across space. All three pairs are entwined, and all six stars go through eclipses to our view. https://go.nasa.gov/3TZloX4
Eclipsing binary schematic headlined Structure of Sextuple System TYC 7037-89-1. This schematic shows the configuration. The inner quadruple is composed of two binaries, A and C, which orbit each other every four years or so. An outer binary, B, orbits the quadruple roughly every 2,000 years. All three pairs are eclipsing binaries. The orbits shown are not to scale. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
April 12, 2024 at 9:09 PM
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A super-Earth in the habitable zone
1,400 light-years away, Earth has a bigger, older cousin. Kepler-452 b orbits a Sun-like star in 385 days and has a temperature similar to Earth's.
https://go.nasa.gov/4aPYzvN
A Spin Around An Exoplanet Most Like Earth - NASA
This artistic animation depicts one possible appearance of the planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of star that is similar to our sun. The star, Keple...
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April 11, 2024 at 6:36 PM
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Pretty in purple 💜
Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud circles the Milky Way in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas slowly collapse to form new stars. https://go.nasa.gov/4cVt59F
The Large magellanic cloud shines in purple with black streaks in this image from @NASAHubble. The gas and dust is purple and new stars shine in white and blue.
April 10, 2024 at 8:40 PM
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Earth hasn't always been a pale blue dot. It's also been a lava-covered rock, a tropical riot of earth-shaking dinosaurs, and an Ice Age expanse where cave-dwelling humans hunted mammoths. If we're looking for another Earth, which one? https://go.nasa.gov/3PVaVLl
An infographic is headlined Earth through the ages and shows graphical illustrations of five different planet Earths. The first is pale orange dot, 3.3-3.8 billion years ago when the planet was shrouded in a murky haze. Second is Snowball Earth, when the planet was covered in ice, 630 million years ago. Next is the Dinosaur Era, 252 to 66 million years ago. The Last Ice Age was 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago and Present Day Earth, 11,700 years ago to now, the Halocene
April 9, 2024 at 11:19 PM
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Our Sun may not look a day over 4.5 billion years old, but it's hard to date stars much farther away. Our next-gen @NASARoman will be able to help determine the ages of hundreds of thousands of stars at the center of our galaxy! 🤩 https://go.nasa.gov/3PSeG40
Image of the Sun with sunspots on the yellow-orange disk. This image of our Sun was taken in August 2012 by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows a number of sunspots. Other stars also experience starspots, which cause the star’s observed brightness to vary as the spots rotate in and out of view. By measuring those changes in brightness, astronomers can infer the star’s rotation period. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will collect brightness measurements for hundreds of thousands of stars located in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, yielding information about their rotation rates. Credit: NASA
April 9, 2024 at 6:08 PM
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Eclipses in space are common. They can help reveal details of an exoplanet's atmosphere, as seen here by @NASAWebb. Meanwhile, @NASA has everything else you need to know about Monday's total solar #eclipse here: https://go.nasa.gov/3vEFsWO
2024 Total Eclipse - NASA Science
On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse moved across North America, passing over Mexico, the United States, and Canada. A total solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, co...
science.nasa.gov
April 5, 2024 at 3:53 PM
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We are made of star stuff and you can see it!
@NASAWebb took a closer look at a starburst galaxy, and its detailed image is flecked with green — areas of iron, most of them supernova remnants — iron like that in the blood running through your veins. https://go.nasa.gov/3TKd65x
Left: Messier 82 as imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Hour-glass-shaped red plumes of gas are shooting outward from above and below a bright blue, disk-shaped center of a galaxy. This galaxy is surrounded by many white stars and set against the black background of space. A small square highlights the section that the image on the right shows in greater detail. White text at bottom reads Hubble. Right: A section of Messier 82 as imaged by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. An edge-on spiral starburst galaxy with a bright white, glowing core set against the black background of space. A white band of the edge-on disk extends from lower left to upper right. Dark brown tendrils of dust are scattered thinly along this band. Many white points in various sizes – stars or star clusters – are scattered throughout the image, but are most heavily concentrated toward the center. Many clumpy, red filaments extend vertically above and below the galaxy’s plane. White text at bottom reads Webb.
April 3, 2024 at 8:19 PM
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Sometimes you just have to make your own eclipse. (Not April 8, ofc! 🤩) We can use an instrument called a Coronagraph to block a star's incredible light to reveal much smaller planets. Our next-gen telescope @NASARoman will test the tech in space. 🖤 https://go.nasa.gov/3xtIsWk
That Starry Night Sky? It's Full of Eclipses - NASA Science
Stars and their planets make their own eclipses – important scientific tools for detecting and characterizing exoplanets.
science.nasa.gov
April 3, 2024 at 5:18 PM
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As we count down to the eclipse on April 8, it makes us think about similar eclipses among the stars.
How often we see them depends on our point of view. Literally. And they offer a wonderland of science! https://go.nasa.gov/3THI0eO
Artist's concept shows the red-dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, at the upper left, with two large dots on the face of the disk representing transiting planets; five more planets are shown at varying positions descending toward the lower right as they orbit the star. Artist's concept shows the TRAPPIST-1 planets as they might be seen from Earth using an extremely powerful – and fictional – telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
April 2, 2024 at 11:07 PM
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Big, blue and super-hot 💙
Winds from giant stars drive galaxy evolution and seed galaxies with the elements needed for life. Those elements are cooked up in stars and then injected into space as a star dies. https://go.nasa.gov/3Q5tBrV
This @NASAHubble image shows a roughly circular, wreath-like area of red, orange, beige, brown, and green clouds with many wisps and filaments. In the center of this wreath-like structure is a dark cavity filled with hundreds of sparkling, blue stars. The stars are not evenly distributed, with more on the right half of the image. Some blue stars also appear on top of the surrounding, wispy clouds. The Hubble Space Telescope image of a star-forming region containing massive, young, blue stars in 30 Doradus, the Tarantula Nebula. Located within the Large Magellanic Cloud.
March 29, 2024 at 9:43 PM
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The closest exoplanet to Earth is just 4 light-years away. But traveling as fast as @NASAVoyager, it would still take us 75,000 years to reach it. Exoplanets are far, yet we've discovered almost 5,600 of them! https://go.nasa.gov/3vooMCT
An illustration shows the imagined surface of Proxima Centauri b, a super-earth exoplanet. There is a star setting in the sky, with another star smaller and farther away. The surface is rocky nd the sky is dark, except for the orange glow of the sun.
March 29, 2024 at 4:39 PM
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There is evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are "water worlds." These worlds, in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, are unlike any planet found in our solar system. https://go.nasa.gov/3x6nDQC
Left: a cross section of Earth showing its interior. Right: a cross section of the blue world, Kepler-138 d with a brown core (rocks & metal) below a dark blue high-pressure water layer that is below a light blue water vapor envelope. This is an artist's illustration showing a cross-section of the Earth (left) and the exoplanet Kepler-138 d (right). Like the Earth, this exoplanet has an interior composed of metals and rocks (brown portion), but Kepler-138 d also has a thick layer of high-pressure water in various forms: supercritical and potentially liquid water deep inside the planet and an extended water vapor envelope (shades of blue) above it. These water layers make up more than 50% of its volume, or a depth of about 1,243 miles (2,000 kilometers). The Earth, in comparison, has a negligible fraction of liquid water with an average ocean depth of less than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). Benoit Gougeon (University of Montreal)
March 26, 2024 at 9:35 PM
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We can do a lot of science during an eclipse. An exoplanet eclipse helped reveal water vapor on a planet 400 light-years from Earth! https://go.nasa.gov/3PCY540
Discovery Alert: Webb Maps and Finds Traces of Water in an Ultra-hot Gas Giant
Scientists used the Webb Telescope identified water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-18 b, and made a temperature map of the planet as it slipped behind, and reappeared from, its star.
exoplanets.nasa.gov
March 26, 2024 at 6:24 PM
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Jets blast across space, slicing through the gas and dust of a nebula in this new @NASAHubble image. The bright object to the far right (hidden by a dark lane of dust) is a forming star, FS Tau B, surrounded by material that can eventually form planets: https://go.nasa.gov/3PwaarB
A bright point of light shines near center-right with diffraction spikes, surrounded by glowing clouds against black space. A blue jet of material extends roughly throughout the center of the image, partially obscured by the clouds.
March 25, 2024 at 9:19 PM
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To see and find exoplanets, we often have to block the overwhelming light from the nearby star. It's like making an eclipse! Meanwhile, are YOU ready for the April 8 eclipse on Earth?
#MondayMotivation: Get ready! https://go.nasa.gov/3TRPEEL
What to Expect: A Solar Eclipse Guide
science.nasa.gov
March 25, 2024 at 5:36 PM
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Good Dog (Stars)!🐶
Sirius A, the brightest star in our night sky, revolves with its faint, tiny stellar companion Sirius B. Both are in the Canis Major (Big Dog) constellation. Sirius B may look tiny, but it's also massive, the remains of an exploded star. #NationalPuppyDay
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows Sirius A, the brightest star in our nighttime sky, along with its faint, tiny stellar companion, Sirius B. Astronomers overexposed the image of Sirius A [at center] so that the dim Sirius B [tiny dot at lower left] could be seen. The cross-shaped diffraction spikes and concentric rings around Sirius A, and the small ring around Sirius B, are artifacts produced within the telescope's imaging system. The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. Sirius A, only 8.6 light-years from Earth, is the fifth closest star system known. Sirius B, a white dwarf, is very faint because of its tiny size, only 7,500 miles in diameter. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to the sun.
March 23, 2024 at 9:20 PM
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A cauldron of planetary potential🤩
Two developing stars are swirled by ices containing complex organic molecules – exactly the sort of ingredients needed to form habitable exoplanets! https://go.nasa.gov/3VhOxPM
An image of a region of a molecular cloud. The orange cloud is dense and bright close to the top of the image, like rolling clouds, and grows darker and more wispy toward the bottom and in the top corner. One bright star with six short diffraction spikes and several dimmer stars are visible as light spots among the clouds. This image at a wavelength of 15 microns was taken by MIRI (the Mid-Infrared Instrument) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, of a region near the protostar known as IRAS 23385. IRAS 23385 and IRAS 2A (not visible in this image) were targets for a recent research effort by astronomers that used Webb to discover that the key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds are present in early-stage protostars, where planets have not yet formed. NASA, ESA, CSA, W. Rocha (Leiden University)
March 22, 2024 at 7:23 PM
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A black hole just minding its own business 🕶️
@chandraxray sees a supermassive black hole having much less of an impact on its surroundings than expected. https://go.nasa.gov/4a1RMzn
This composite image shows a quasar, a rare and extreme class of supermassive black hole, that’s located about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth. At the center of the image is a bright, white, circular light, similar to the beam of a flashlight if it was pointed directly toward you. A fuzzy, bar-shaped structure of red-colored radio light, slightly larger than the width of the white light, surrounds the circular structure. The red bar also extends above and below the white light, stretching in a somewhat straight line from about the one o’clock position to the seven o’clock position on a clock face. On either side of the red bar, X-ray light is present as blue, wispy clouds of hot gas that are brighter closer to the red and white features. The brighter clouds represent more dense gas.
March 21, 2024 at 9:44 PM
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Pity the brown dwarf?
Not a planet, not a star, but something in between. Not even brown. These red objects are often born with a binary companion, like many stars, but over time they drift apart due to the pull of passing stars. https://go.nasa.gov/3TJT10h
his is an artist's concept of a brown dwarf. This class of object is too large to be a planet (and did not form in the same way), but is too small to be a star because it cannot sustain nuclear fusion, since it is less massive than even the smallest stars. A brown dwarf is marked by wind-driven horizontal bands of thick clouds that may alternate with relatively cloud-free bands, giving the object a striped appearance. Whirling storm systems as big as terrestrial continents, or even small planets, might exist. The name "brown dwarf" is a misnomer because the object would typically appear red to the naked eye. It is brightest in infrared light. Many brown dwarfs have binary companions. But as they age, the binary system gravitationally falls apart, and each dwarf goes its separate way, according to a recent Hubble Space Telescope study. The background stars in this illustration are a science visualization assembled from the Gaia spacecraft star catalog. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
March 21, 2024 at 5:11 PM