Confirmed exoplanets

NASA announced on 17 September 2025 that the count of confirmed planets outside our solar system had passed 6,000. Its public tally has kept climbing since then.

The number rises as new discoveries are confirmed, so check NASA's live tally for the latest.

Context

An exoplanet is counted as confirmed once its existence has been established by careful analysis, usually through more than one observation or a strong statistical check. NASA keeps a public archive, the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which adds planets as papers are published, so the total shifts upward gradually rather than in a single jump.

The first planets around another star, found in 1992, orbited a pulsar. The first around a Sun-like star arrived in 1995. Since then the main discovery methods have been the transit method, which looks for tiny dips in a star's light as a planet crosses it, and the radial velocity method, which detects the star's wobble. Space missions such as Kepler and TESS found many thousands of candidates.

The count of 6,000 is a milestone rather than a special physical threshold. Different catalogues use slightly different rules, so other databases may show somewhat different totals.

Detected worlds range from rocky planets smaller than Earth to gas giants many times Jupiter's mass, and the data suggest that planets are common around stars in our galaxy.