tinychaseExoplanet kiosks · confirmed planets, 1992 to 2026
The Discovery Race
Nobody had confirmed a planet beyond the solar system before 1992. Now there are , and most of them arrived in two bursts: the years the Kepler mission's backlog was validated in bulk. Each column is a year; the colours are how the planets were found. Tap a year for who found what.
Who finds them
The twelve most productive observatories and missions, coloured by the method they mostly use. Kepler alone found more planets than every ground telescope combined.
How they are found
Four families of method. Counts are planets in the archive credited to each.
Data: TerraPulse exoplanet dex (NASA Exoplanet Archive, confirmed planets table; US federal public domain), exported 2026-09-27. A planet's year is its published discovery year, which for Kepler and K2 candidates is often the year a statistical validation paper confirmed hundreds at once rather than the year of first detection. "Other" gathers imaging, transit and eclipse timing, orbital brightness modulation, pulsar and pulsation timing, astrometry and disk kinematics. 2026 is a partial year. Planets the archive flags as controversial are counted and noted.