Which year found the most exoplanets?
More exoplanets were confirmed in 2016 than in any other year: 1,504 worlds, 23.6% of every planet in this catalog, almost all of them from a single re-analysis of Kepler's data. Everything about 2016 →
| # | Year | Worlds confirmed | Share of the catalog |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 1 | 2016 | 1,504 | 23.6% |
| 2 | 2014 | 872 | 13.7% |
| 3 | 2021 | 564 | 8.9% |
| 4 | 2022 | 368 | 5.8% |
| 5 | 2023 | 323 | 5.1% |
| 6 | 2018 | 308 | 4.8% |
| 7 | 2026 | 277 | 4.3% |
| 8 | 2024 | 260 | 4.1% |
| 9 | 2025 | 245 | 3.8% |
| 10 | 2020 | 234 | 3.7% |
| 11 | 2019 | 196 | 3.1% |
| 12 | 2015 | 155 | 2.4% |
| 13 | 2017 | 152 | 2.4% |
| 14 | 2012 | 144 | 2.3% |
| 15 | 2011 | 142 | 2.2% |
| 16 | 2013 | 128 | 2.0% |
| 17 | 2010 | 93 | 1.5% |
| 18 | 2009 | 87 | 1.4% |
| 19 | 2008 | 62 | 1.0% |
| 20 | 2007 | 52 | 0.8% |
| 21 | 2005 | 36 | 0.6% |
| 22 | 2006 | 32 | 0.5% |
| 23 | 2002 | 29 | 0.5% |
| 24 | 2004 | 27 | 0.4% |
| 25 | 2003 | 22 | 0.3% |
Showing the top 25 of 34 that qualify.
Exoplanet discovery does not arrive at a steady rate. It arrives in avalanches, when a survey that has been quietly collecting candidates for years validates thousands of them at once. The largest single year came from Kepler, which stared at one patch of sky for four years and then had its backlog confirmed statistically rather than one planet at a time.
The year attached to each planet is its confirmation year as recorded by the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is not always the year the signal was first seen. A candidate can wait years for follow-up, so these counts describe when worlds were confirmed rather than when they were first noticed. The current year always looks thin: it is still being filled in.
Which year found the most exoplanets?
More exoplanets were confirmed in 2016 than in any other year: 1,504 worlds, 23.6% of every planet in this catalog, almost all of them from a single re-analysis of Kepler's data.
Why did one year produce so many planets at once?
Because of how Kepler's candidates were validated. Rather than confirming each planet individually, astronomers showed statistically that the overwhelming majority of a large batch of candidates had to be real planets, which turned years of accumulated signals into confirmed worlds in a single announcement.
How many exoplanets have been found in total?
This catalog holds 6,370 confirmed exoplanets, drawn from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and refreshed weekly. The number rises most weeks.
Is exoplanet discovery slowing down?
The huge single-year spikes have passed with Kepler, but the steady rate has not fallen: TESS now surveys almost the whole sky for transits, and ground-based spectrographs keep finding worlds around nearby stars. The difference is that recent discoveries are more often small, nearby, and worth studying in detail rather than counted in bulk.
Keep exploring: all records · browse discoveries by year · browse by telescope