Space · Planetary Discovery

Confirmed Exoplanets

From 2 to over 6,000 worlds beyond our solar system, most found in the last 15 years.

• 2 → 6,451 confirmed planets, 1992–2026
• Doubling slowed from 2.2 years to 11
• Kepler alone confirmed 2,787, about 43%
• Strict criteria; ~70 potentially habitable

The first exoplanets were confirmed in 1992, two rocky worlds around the pulsar PSR B1257+12; the first around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, followed in 1995. Radial velocity led the search from there, star by star, and the count reached 498 by the end of 2010. Then Kepler stared at one field in Cygnus, watching about 150,000 stars at once for the brightness dips of planets crossing in front, and alone confirmed 2,787 of the planets now known, about 43% of the catalogue.

The count doubled every 2.2 years from the end of 1995 to the end of 2016, and since Kepler retired in late 2018 the doubling time has slowed to about 11 years. TESS has surveyed the whole sky since 2018 and JWST has been reading atmospheres since 2022; TESS finds candidates in quantity, but confirmation is the bottleneck, and nothing has matched Kepler’s deep single-field yield. At the pace of the last two years, more than 300 confirmations a year, doubling again would take well over a decade.

NASA’s Exoplanet Archive applies strict criteria and counted 6,451 on 20 October 2026. Of those the Habitable Worlds Catalog rates about 70 as potentially habitable, roughly 1% of the total, and only 29 as likely rocky worlds that could hold surface liquid water. Each point is the Archive’s own count of planets discovered through the end of that year, taken straight from its public query interface, so the whole series can be reproduced from a single query rather than assembled from round numbers. Broader catalogues use different inclusion criteria, a methodology gap rather than a data dispute.

Source: NASA Exoplanet Archive

Download the data: exoplanets.csv · exoplanets.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.