How many planets outside our solar system are discovered each year?

Astronomers confirmed 246 new planets around other stars in 2025. The first were found in 1992, and the count leaped in 2014 and 2016 (872 and 1,504), when NASA's Kepler team confirmed hundreds of its candidates at once. The archive counts a planet in the year its discovery was published and keeps adding late confirmations, so recent years can still rise.

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Key facts

Measure: Confirmed exoplanets discovered. Written from the data below.

  • The latest figure, for 2025, is 246.
  • That is 123 times the 1992 figure, 2.
  • The highest was 1,504 in 2016.
  • The lowest was 0 in 1993.

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Source and date

Source
NASA Exoplanet Archive, Planetary Systems Composite Data
License
Public domain (NASA data); this research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, operated by Caltech under contract with NASA
Data as of
Published

Citation

Chartly. “How many planets outside our solar system are discovered each year?” Chart. Data: NASA Exoplanet Archive, Planetary Systems Composite Data, https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=PSCompPars (data as of December 31, 2025). https://chart.ly/charts/exoplanets-discovered-per-year (accessed November 4, 2026).

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The data

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The file has the numbers in this table, with the source, license and date. Please credit the source and Chartly. Developers can also get them as JSON (how).

Year of discovery Confirmed exoplanets discovered
1992 2
1993 0
1994 1
1995 1
1996 6
1997 1
1998 6
1999 13
2000 16
2001 12
2002 29
2003 22
2004 27
2005 36
2006 32
2007 52
2008 62
2009 87
2010 93
2011 141
2012 144
2013 128
2014 872
2015 155
2016 1,504
2017 152
2018 308
2019 194
2020 234
2021 564
2022 367
2023 323
2024 260
2025 246

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