The collection of known Exoplanets represented based on their date of detection and their relative size to scale. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system with known radii. The largest planetary bodies are annotated with their names. Note that there is some uncertainty in classifying and measuring “exoplanets”. The current figure includes objects (such as some Brown Dwarfs) that do not necessarily fulfil the true definition of an “exoplanet”. This definition would limit the collection to planetary bodies with true masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium, which is currently calculated to be 13 Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity, that orbit stars or stellar remnants are (see e.g., https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/IAU2003_WGESP.pdf for a discussion thereof).
The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet occurred in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail, who detected two Earth-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. These were the first exoplanets ever confirmed, but because they orbit a neutron star rather than a Sun-like star, they were a very unusual find.
First discovery 30 years ago
In 1995, Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first confirmed exoplanet around a main-sequence star (a more Sun-like star), named 51 Pegasi b and shown in the very centre of the graphic. This discovery marked a major milestone and is often considered the true beginning of modern exoplanet astronomy. Mayor and Queloz were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.
The Scientific colour map ‘devon‘ is used to represent data accurately and to all readers.
- Creator: Fabio Crameri
- This version: 08.06.2025
- License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri presenting data from exoplanet.eu is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
- Related reference: http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/
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