2022 Exoplanet Archive News

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For previous years' news, see the 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011-12 archives.

For a compilation of periodic tips that have appeared in past news items, see the Tip Archive.

To view only the most recently added planets and updated parameters (default and non-default), see this pre-filtered and pre-sorted interactive table.

May 12, 2022

Nine New Planets

This week's nine new planets include three more close-in planets in the TOI-500 system, which lends support to the theory that planets form through gentle secular migration instead of highly eccentric migrations. Read the discovery paper by Serrano et al. 2022.

The new planets are TOI-500 c, d, & e, TOI-1696 b, TOI-1710 b, TOI-2136 b, HD 103891 b, HD 105779 b, and HIP 94235 b. Find the new data in the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters.

ExoFOP-K2 Campaign 9 Contributed Data

We've migrated the K2 Campaign 9 microlensing data from the Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program (ExoFOP) site. Executed in 2016, K2C9 was designed to simultaneously observe gravitational microlensing events from space with the Kepler telescope and from Earth with ground-based telescopes to see a parallax effect in the shape and time of the lensing events. The

Read the documentation and access the data set from the ExoFOP-K2 Campaign 9 page. (The Contributed Data page also links to the new page.)

Updated Movies

Two of our animated movies based on our pre-generated plots now include more recent archive data:

33 Years of Discoveries shows the number of exoplanet discoveries in mass-period space from 1989 through April 2022.

Exoplanets: Cumulative Detections by Discovery Year is a histogram showing the cumulative number of exoplanet discoveries by detection method each year from 1989 through April 2022.

You can always find these movies on our Pre-generated Plots page, which also contains data plots of current archive data that are ready for use in presentations and publications. All plots are available in a colorblind-friendly palette as well, and some can be customized further using Filtergraph, a data visualization tool developed at Vanderbilt University.

May 5, 2022

Seven Planets and 180 Parameter Sets Added

This week's seven new planets were found either through their radial velocities (pi Men d, TYC 2187-512-1 b, and iot Dra c) or spied on by TESS during their transits (TOI-1246 b, c, d, & e). We've also added 180 new sets of parameters—most of them from Patel & Espinoza 2022. Find the new data in the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters.

April 21, 2022

Three New Planets and 10 New K2 Candidates

We've added two more circumbinary planets found in the Kepler-451 system, and GJ 514 b, a super-Earth that moves in and out of the habitable zone in an eccentric orbit. Find their data in the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters.

There are also 10 new K2 candidates in the K2 Planets and Candidates Table. Pro Tip: To display only this week's new candidates and parameter sets, scroll horizontally to the Release Date column (the last one) and enter 2022-04-21 to filter the results.

News panel image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith

April 14, 2022

Two New Planets, Including AB Aur b

The AB Aur system is the second protoplanetary disk where an embedded exoplanet has been found, which supports the "disk instability" theory of planet formation. Read NASA's media release and the discovery paper.

The other new planet is TOI-620 b. There are also new parameters for TOI-2076 b, c, & d, TOI-216 b & c, KELT-24 b (MASCARA-3 b), and WD 0806-661 (GJ 3483 b).

Access all of these new data from the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters, which offers a more complete table of planet parameters combined from multiple references and calculations.

News panel image credits: Science: NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie (Subaru Telescope, Eureka Scientific Inc.); Image Processing: Thayne Currie (Subaru Telescope, Eureka Scientific Inc.), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

March 31, 2022

Four New Planets, Including A Newborn Giant

This week we have four new planets, including 11 million-year-old TOI-1227 b, which has a radius almost equal to Jupiter, making it the largest planet ever seen around a low-mass star. Read the discovery paper and this Nature article for details.

This week's other new planets are HD 191939 e & f and OGLE-2014-BLG-0319L b. We've also added 13 new K2 candidates and parameter sets for six planets.

March 21, 2022

5,000+ Alien Worlds and Counting

Today's update marks a major milestone for exoplanet science: the archive has more than 5,000 planets!

In the 30 years that have passed since two planets were found orbiting pulsar PSR1257+12, the field of exoplanet science has exploded. New missions, instruments, and detection techniques have proliferated, and with them the discoveries of all sorts of alien worlds. This week's milestone marks 30 years of discovery that shows no signs of ebbing, as current missions like NASA's TESS and ESA's Gaia and upcoming missions like NASA's Roman and ESA's PLATO will require the NASA Exoplanet Archive to expand and scale for the onslaught of more planets and bigger data sets. We accept the challenge—and we can't wait!

In celebration of today's milestone, our friends and colleagues at NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program have created some fun and educational media about our search for new worlds:

This NASA media release reflects on what we've learned about exoplanets over three decades.
This video shows how we've managed to find exoplanets everywhere we've looked.
What do 5,005 exoplanets sound like? Turn up the volume for this sonification, where instrumental melodies and tones play according to a chart of every exoplanet discovered. Be sure to check out the version for mobile devices for a 360-degree experience.

This Week's New Planets

This week's release of 65 new planets features the K2-384 system—a TRAPPIST-1-like system of five small planets orbiting a mid-M dwarf—as well as K2-399 b, an ultra-short period sub-Saturn located where hot Saturns are not typically found. Read the discovery paper for details.

The other new planets this week are WASP-189 b, HD 73583 b & c, TOI-1670 b & c, EPIC 206317286 c (a.k.a. K2-303 c), and all K2 systems starting with K2-365 through K2-409! This pre-filtered and pre-sorted interactive table contains the full list. You may also access all of the new data from the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters, which offers a more complete table of planet parameters combined from multiple references and calculations.

News panel image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Miller (IPAC)

March 11, 2022

Five Planets, Including Two Microlensing Super-Earths

This week's new planets include two super-Earth microlensing planets—a further indication that microlensing detections are ramping up and pushing to smaller-mass planets. The new planets are KMT-2017-BLG-2509L b, OGLE-2017-BLG-1099L b, OGLE-2019-BLG-0299L b, KMT-2021-BLG-0912L b, and KMT-2018-BLG-1988L b. These bring the archive's total confirmed planet count to 4,940. Only 60 discoveries to go to hit the 5,000-planet milestone!

February 25, 2022

Two More Planets and New Parameters

This week's new planets are GJ 3929 b and TOI-1759 b, both discovered using the transit method. There are also new parameter sets for WASP-28 b and WASP-151 b. Today's update brings the archive's total confirmed planet count to 4,935.

February 17, 2022

19 New Planets

All but two of this week's new planets are TESS discoveries, and 13 of them are potentially terrestrial. The TOI-1860 system appears to have the youngest solar twin with a known planet. Learn more in Giacalone et al. 2022.

The new planets are Kepler-1972 b & c, TOI-1268 b, TOI-2337 b, TOI-4329 b, TOI-2669 b, TOI-206 b, TOI-500 b, TOI-544 b, TOI-833 b, TOI-1075 b, TOI-1411 b, TOI-1442 b, TOI-1693 b, TOI-1860 b, TOI-2260 b, TOI-2411 b, TOI-2427 b, and TOI-2445 b.

Final UKIRT Microlensing Survey Data Release

The 2019 data for the UKIRT Microlensing Survey are now public!

After a pandemic-induced delay, all data for the multi-year UKIRT Microlensing Survey toward the Galactic bulge can be accessed from the Exoplanet Archive:

Documentation for DR 2019 (and all earlier releases) is on the UKIRT Mission page.
To download UKIRT data by wget script, go to the Bulk Download page.
To search for and download a subset of the data, use the UKIRT Time Series Search interface. (Consult the Data Column Definitions document for the full list of available parameters.
UKIRT data are also now supported through the archive's Table Access Protocol (TAP) service.

If you use archive data or services for your research, please include the following Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as part of your acknowledgment: DOI 10.26133/NEA7. Additional acknowledgements are listed in UKIRT Acknowledgments.

February 10, 2022

Big News: The archive's social media presence has merged with NExScI!

If you follow the Exoplanet Archive on Twitter or Facebook, you may have noticed the accounts now say NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, or NExScI. Don't worry, we are still here! This important update enables us to better serve the scientific community and inform them of not only Exoplanet Archive items, but also NExScI activities.

Why the change?

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) provides science operations and services for NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program projects, which includes the NASA Exoplanet Archive. By merging the archive's established social media presence with NExScI, we hope to introduce NExScI and its offerings to a wider audience.

For example, did you know NExScI administers and schedules NASA's portion of time on the Keck telescopes? And that NExScI assists with the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program and runs the annual Sagan Summer Workshop? And that NExScI operates the NEID Archive—NASA's newest Extreme Precision Radial Velocity spectrometer—as part of the NN-Explore Program? NExScI has also developed and maintains several public astronomy data archives and software tools, including the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA).

These are the kinds of things we hope to feature on Twitter and Facebook. (You can also learn more on the NExScI website: https://nexsci.caltech.edu/.)

What has changed

The archive's Twitter handle and Facebook page name have been changed from @NASAExoArchive to @NExScI_IPAC and @NExScI, respectively. If you were already following these accounts, you will just see the name change and more NExScI-inclusive content.

What isn't changing

The new NExScI Facebook and Twitter accounts will continue publishing archive news—including the weekly new planet count. If you were already following the Exoplanet Archive, there is no need for you to do anything. .

If you're not following the accounts, please take a minute to do so now:

Follow @NExScI_IPAC (formerly @NASAExoArchive) on Twitter
Like us on Facebook

And if you're not on social media, you can always subscribe to our exoplanet-announce mailing list for a text version of our news updates.

February 3, 2022

We've added six planets this week, bringing the total number of planets in the archive to 4,914. Only 86 discoveries to go before we reach the next milestone of 5,000 planets!

The new planets are TOI-1064 b & c, TOI-2184 b, HD 22532 b, HD 64121 b, and HD 69123 b.

January 27, 2022

5 Planets and New ExoClock Ephemerides

One of this week's five new planets is b Cen AB b, an imaged planet that orbits two stars, each more massive than any other star known to host planets. Read the ESO media release and the Janson et al. discovery paper for details. The other four planets are OGLE-2018-BLG-0383L b, KMT-2021-BLG-0322L b, OGLE-2018-BLG-0532L b, and LTT 1445 A c.

We've also added orbital ephemerides for 180 transiting planets from the ExoClock project, which is part of the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) space mission.

News panel image credit: ESO/Janson et al.

January 13, 2022

Happy New Year!

We're starting 2022 with 19 new planets, including two with media releases: the longest-period TESS planet found to date, and a new Kepler planet that may have its own moon!

Discovered by citizen scientists, TOI-2180 b is a TESS giant with a 261-day orbit. Learn more in this NASA web feature, the media release by the University California, Riverside, and the discovery paper.

Kepler-1708 b is a newly validated planet orbited by a credible exomoon candidate called Kepler-1708 b i. This is the second exomoon candidate ever detected—the first was found orbiting Kepler-1625 b. Note that neither exomoon candidate is currently in the archive (yet). Read the Columbia University media release and the discovery paper about Kepler-1708 b.

The other new planets added to the archive this week are: KOI-4777.01 (a.k.a. Kepler-1971 b), Kepler-1705 b & c, BD+60 1417 b, HIP 75056 A b, HD 360 b, HD 10975 b, HD 79181 b, HD 99283 b, ups Leo b, HD 161178 b, HD 219139 b, gam Psc b, HIP 5763 b, HIP 34222 b, HIP 86221 b, and OGLE-2019-BLG-0960L b.

Access all the new data from the Planetary Systems Table and its companion table, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters, which offers a more complete table of planet parameters combined from multiple references and calculations.

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