When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An artist’s illustration of the various exoplanets found, with rows of colorful planets of all colors and sizes over a dark background. | Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterThis year, the number of NASA-tracked confirmed worlds discovered beyond our solar system surpassed 6,000, and several thousand more await confirmation.The milestone, reached just three decades after the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the first planet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995, is largely the result of the planet-hunting power of NASA’s Kepler space telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).AdvertisementAdvertisementThe growing tally reflects how dramatically humanity’s view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has expanded — and how diverse its planetary population has turned out to be.Far from mirroring the relatively flat, orderly architecture of our own solar system, new observations and more detailed reexaminations of familiar worlds revealed entire classes of planets with no counterparts at home — super-Earths, mini-Neptunes and hot Jupiters — as well as worlds on contorted orbits that are forcing astronomers to rethink how planets form and evolve.As the year comes to a close, here’s a look back at some of the most intriguing, puzzling and rule-breaking exoplanets astronomers studied in 2025. These worlds illustrate both how far exoplanet science has come and how much there still is to learn.”Tatooine” worlds More “Tatooine-like” worlds leapt from science fiction into the exoplanet database this year, as astronomers identified multiple planets orbiting two suns — sometimes in configurations that challenge the basic rules of planetary formation.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe strangest of these worlds emerged in April, when a team reported the discovery of 2M1510 (AB) b, a planet orbiting two brown dwarfs, which are often called “failed stars” because they’re not massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion.Located about 120 light-years from Earth, the world orbits above and below the poles of its two stars, rather than along the usual flat plane. The discovery team inferred the planet’s presence using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, after detecting an unusual backward wobble in the brown dwarfs’ orbits. This was a gravitational clue that the researchers said could be explained only by a hidden, steeply inclined planet that was possibly knocked into place by a stell …
