The NASA Exoplanet Archive now lists 245 confirmed planets with a discovery year of 2025. The nearest orbits Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away; the fastest goes around its star in under three hours; and more than half were found by a single NASA satellite. We queried the archive's composite planet table on 14 September 2026 and turned the 2025 entries into five charts.
Most new planets were caught crossing their star
The exoplanets discovered in 2025 by discovery method chart shows how lopsided the techniques are. Transit searches, which spot a planet as it passes in front of its star, found 144 of the 245 planets, or 58.8%. Radial velocity found 61. Together the two methods account for 83.7% of the year. Microlensing added 23, direct imaging 8, transit timing variations 6 and astrometry 3.
The archive only counts an object as a planet if its mass, or minimum mass, is no more than 30 Jupiter masses, it is not free floating, and follow-up work has made a false positive unlikely. The result must also be peer reviewed and accepted for publication, so the 2025 total can still grow as more papers come through.
One satellite found more than half of them
The exoplanets discovered in 2025 by discovery facility chart credits NASA's TESS satellite with 129 planets, 52.7% of the year, and 127 of those were transit discoveries. The next names are a long way behind: La Silla Observatory and the KMTNet microlensing network have 18 each. Kepler, too, is still credited with 5 new planets in 2025. Only 21 different facility labels appear in the archive for the whole year, and nine of them account for just one or two planets each.
New worlds at Proxima Centauri and Barnard's star
The nearest exoplanets discovered in 2025 chart starts very close to home. Proxima Centauri d, at 4.2 light-years, is credited by the archive to Suarez Mascareno et al. (2025). Three planets around Barnard's star, Barnard c, d and e, share second place at 6.0 light-years, joining Barnard b, which the archive lists as a 2024 discovery. Ten of the 2025 discoveries orbit stars within 32 light-years, and 14 of the 15 nearest were found by radial velocity rather than transits.
A year that takes less than three hours
The shortest orbits of exoplanets discovered in 2025 chart is led by ZTF J1828+2308 b, which completes an orbit in 2.69 hours. ZTF J1230-2655 b takes 5.66 hours, and both were found by the Zwicky Transient Facility. TOI-6324 b is third at 6.70 hours. Five of the year's discoveries go around their star in less than a day, and 11 of the 15 fastest orbits belong to planets found by TESS.
Some of the new planets are 27 times heavier than Jupiter
The most massive exoplanets discovered in 2025 chart includes only planets with a measured true mass, not a minimum mass. KMT-2024-BLG-0404L b, a microlensing discovery, tops it at 27.24 Jupiter masses, followed by BEBOP-4 AB b at 26.3. Eleven of the 16 planets in the chart are above 13 Jupiter masses; the archive's upper limit for a planet is 30. Minimum masses were left out, and that excludes 53 of the 61 planets found by radial velocity.
| Record among 2025 discoveries | Planet | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Nearest | Proxima Cen d | 4.2 light-years |
| Shortest orbit | ZTF J1828+2308 b | 2.69 hours |
| Most massive (true mass) | KMT-2024-BLG-0404L b | 27.24 Jupiter masses |
| Most common method | Transit | 144 planets |
| Most productive facility | TESS | 129 planets |
How to read these numbers
The archive lists one discovery paper, one method and one facility for each planet, so other telescopes that helped confirm a planet are not credited. The archive describes its composite table as more complete though not necessarily self-consistent, and a planet's values in it can come from different references. About a third of the 2025 planet radii in that table are values calculated by the archive rather than measured, so this batch has no chart of the largest new planets. The archive also points out that other catalogues use their own inclusion rules and may show different totals.