"I had been waiting my entire career for Webb so that we could meaningfully characterize the atmospheres of these smaller ...

The main method used to find each world is shown as one of seven colors. For example ... search on a small patch of the sky and used the transit method of exoplanet detection on 150,000 stars.

Astronomers have been trying to discover evidence that worlds exist around stars other than our Sun since the 19th century.

For centuries, planets beyond our solar system—called exoplanets—existed only in theory and science fiction. It seemed nearly impossible to detect planets light-years away, since the ...

These types of exoplanets are some of the most common in our galaxy - but they've remained mysterious until now.

Most of those observations were made by the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which for four consecutive years kept an eye on a small patch of sky containing a few hundred thousand stars.