tinychaseExoplanet kiosks · starlight and temperature
Goldilocks
Every planet receives some amount of light from its star. Earth's amount is 1. Venus gets 1.9 and boils; Mars gets 0.43 and freezes. The band in between is the habitable zone, not because life is likely there but because liquid water is possible. Here is every confirmed planet by the starlight it gets and the temperature of the star giving it, with the small worlds in the band picked out.
Hover a dot. Earth is marked. Cooler stars sit lower; a planet gets the same light from a dim red dwarf only by orbiting it in days, close enough to be tidally locked.
The temperate small worlds
Every planet in the band that is either under 1.8 Earth radii or, with no radius measured, under 8 Earth masses. Nearest first. Starlight marked "est." is derived here from the star and the orbit rather than taken from the archive.
What this does and does not say
Starlight is the one thing in this chart that is measured or closely derived. Whether a planet is warm depends just as much on its atmosphere, which for almost all of these is unknown: Venus would plot comfortably inside the band. A radius under 1.8 Earths is the rocky side of the radius valley; a mass under 8 Earths is a looser guess, and wobble masses are minimums.
Most of the list orbits red dwarfs. Those stars are the commonest kind and their planets are the easiest to find, but their habitable zones are so close in that the planets are tidally locked and, in their youth, blasted by flares. Nobody knows whether that is fatal.
Data: TerraPulse exoplanet dex (NASA Exoplanet Archive, confirmed planets table; US federal public domain), exported 2026-09-27. Starlight (insolation) is the archive's value where it has one, otherwise derived as stellar luminosity over the square of the orbit's semi-major axis, with luminosity from the star's radius and temperature and the axis from the period and stellar mass by Kepler's third law where the archive lacks it. The habitable zone band is a simple insolation cut, 0.25 to 1.5 (optimistic) and 0.36 to 1.11 (conservative) times Earth's, which ignores the star's colour; the true limits shift outward for red dwarfs. Radial-velocity masses are minimum masses.