Discovery of Extrasolar Planets

Date: January 9, 1992 • Location: Rome, Italy

The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail. They discovered two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12.

An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. In 2016, it was recognized that the first possible evidence of an exoplanet had been noted in 1917, a precovery. As of 8 October 2026, there are 6,445 confirmed exoplanets in 4,834 planetary systems, with 1,070 systems having more than one planet.