The Exoplanet Boom
Planets discovered beyond our solar system, year by year and by detection method — from a trickle in the 1990s to thousands after Kepler.
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The story
Until the 1990s we knew of exactly zero planets outside our own solar system. Then the trickle began — a handful of strange "hot Jupiters" detected by the wobble they induced in their stars. The chart stacks each year's discoveries by detection method over a field of stars.
The explosion comes in 2014 and 2016, when NASA's Kepler space telescope confirmed planets in bulk by watching for the tiny dips in starlight as they transited their suns. In barely three decades the count went from none to more than 5,000 confirmed worlds — and counting. Most stars, we now believe, have planets.