100 exoplanets
In total, 100 exoplanets have been confirmed using the Direct Imaging method (roughly 0.3% of all confirmed exoplanets), and the vast majority were gas giants that orbited at great distances from their stars.

Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far orbiting distant stars, earthly astronomers have captured direct images of only a very few. In each of these images, only one planet can be seen. Now astronomers say they’ve acquired a first-ever direct image of two giant exoplanets, orbiting a sunlike star.

In March 2019, ESO astronomers, employing the GRAVITY instrument on their Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), announced the first direct detection of an exoplanet, HR 8799 e, using optical interferometry.

List of Exoplanet Names

The Hubble results are consistent with exoplanet observations, where planets are found arranged in orbits that are very different than those seen in our solar system. These disk surveys also yield insight into how our solar system formed and developed.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study planets outside our solar system with unparalleled detail — including checking to see if their atmospheres give any indication that a planet is home to life as we know it.

Astronomers have had to devise clever and highly precise techniques to uncover exoplanets. Thanks to its stability and ability to take high-contrast images, Hubble was the first to capture an exoplanet in visible light.

James Webb has been designed to focus on the infrared part of the spectrum from 0.6 (red light) to 28 microns (infrared). This means it won’t be able to see in ultraviolet light like Hubble, but will be able to focus on infrared bright objects like extremely distant galaxies.

This is a list of extrasolar planets that have been directly observed, sorted by observed separations. The lightest, coldest, and oldest planet directly imaged is Proxima Centauri c, which has a mass of 7 MEarth, an effective temperature of 39 K, and an age of about 4.8 Ga.

As of 1 August 2021, there are 4,801 confirmed exoplanets in 3,552 planetary systems, with 789 systems having more than one planet. Most of these were discovered by the Kepler space telescope.

To date, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered and are considered “confirmed.” However, there are thousands of other “candidate” exoplanet detections that require further observations in order to say for sure whether or not the exoplanet is real.

This composite image shows an exoplanet (the red spot on the lower left), orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207 (centre). 2M1207b is the first exoplanet directly imaged and the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf. It was imaged the first time by the VLT in 2004.

Non-Redundant Aperture Masking Interferometry is a method of combining the views of multiple telescopes into a single image, while the other methods are algorithms for combining multiple direct images taken from the same telescope. Although listed in the table below, the identity of Fomalhaut b is disputed. It may not actually be a true exoplanet.

This method works best for young planets that emit infrared light and are far from the glare of the star. Currently, this list includes both directly imaged planets and imaged planetary-mass companions (objects that orbit a star but formed through a binary-star-formation process, not a planet-formation process).

In celebration of the 20 th anniversary of the first confirmed planet around a sun-like star, more than 60 leaders in the field of exoplanet observations chose their favorites among the nearly 2,000 known exoplanets. Some of the exoplanets are rocky, some are gaseous, and some are very, very odd.