NASA Exoplanet Archive · 1992–2026
Thirty-four years ago, humanity knew of no planets beyond our own solar system. Not one.
Then in 1992 two turned up in an unlikely place — circling the dense corpse of a star that had already exploded, 2,000 light years away. The count has climbed every year since.
This wheel holds all of them.
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5,886
Confirmed planets · 4,373 suns
Every dot is a world. Almost none has ever been photographed. We know they exist because a star dimmed by a fraction of a percent on a schedule, or wobbled by a few metres per second, and the pattern held.
Near the middle, a year lasts hours. The innermost world on this chart completes an orbit in 2 hours 41 minutes — a full year, faster than a commute.
Out at the rim a year runs to decades. The outermost takes 26 and a half of ours.
Close to a star means fast, and fast means hot.
Gold is not warm. Gold is around 1,500 kelvin — hot enough to boil iron and rain it back as metal.
The blue rim is the cold end of what we can find: about 308 K. That is still hotter than a kettle.
The comfortable middle, where water stays liquid, barely registers here. Not because those worlds are rare. Because they are almost invisible to us.
Every sun in the catalogue holds a thin wedge of the circle to itself. The dots strung along it are its planets, each sitting at its own orbital distance.
Highlighted here is KOI-351, 2,500 light years off in Cygnus. Eight planets. It is the largest family we have found anywhere, and it is the only one that matches our own for number.
Same sun.
There are 2,271 of them. Not planets that resemble each other, not neighbours in the sky — siblings, sharing a star and the debris disc it was born from.
It is the only genuine relationship in the whole dataset.
3,366
Stars with exactly one known planet
Now look at the ones with no line at all. They are the majority — 57 percent of everything we have found is an only child.
That is almost certainly false about the universe. Planets form in families. It is true about our instruments: we catch the biggest, closest sibling and miss the rest.
The suns are ordered by the year each gave up its first planet. One full turn runs from 1992 to 2026.
One year takes 110 degrees of it. Nearly a third of the circle is 2016 — the year the Kepler mission validated 1,491 planets at once, the largest single haul in the history of the search.
The shape of this picture is partly the shape of one telescope's publishing schedule.
It cannot be. This is a catalogue of planets around other stars.
But Earth has a year of 365.25 days, and on this wheel a year is a distance from the centre. So Earth is not a dot here. It is a ring — 71 percent of the way out.
Follow it round. Almost nothing sits on it.
2
Planets out of 5,886 near Earth's position
Kepler-62 f and Kepler-1126 c. Both about 1.4 times Earth's width. Both found by Kepler. One lies 981 light years away, the other 2,073.
Everything else on that ring is empty.
It is a discovery about us.
A planet on a one-year orbit crosses the face of its star once a year. You need three crossings before anyone will call it real. That is a three-year wait, to measure a dip in starlight of roughly one part in ten thousand, against a star that flickers on its own.
The bright, crowded parts of this wheel are where our telescopes are strong.
The hole in the middle of that ring is where we live.
Data: NASA Exoplanet Archive, PSCompPars table, Caltech-IPAC.
5,886 confirmed planets, 4,373 host stars, 1992–2026.
Nearest known planet: Proxima Cen d, 4.2 light years.
Nothing in this picture was invented, moved or removed.