83% of recorded exoplanet years are shorter than Mercury's.

Mercury circles the Sun in just 88 days. Most of the worlds we have found are faster still. Remove one discovery method and that majority disappears.

Shorter than MercuryLonger

JavaScript enables this explorer. Of 6,091 recorded periods without limit flags, 5,034 are under 87.969 days. Excluding discoveries labeled Transit leaves 482 of 1,306, or 36.9%. Sources are linked below.

01 / Change the lens

How you look shapes
what you find.

Each row spreads one method's planets across year lengths. Move the cutoff, or roll back discovery year. Select a method to open its records below.

A year shorter than 87.969 days

Discovered by 2026

Filters today's catalogue by discovery year. It does not reconstruct earlier archive editions.

Discovery method

1 day10010k1m100m

Below cutoff

Shorter-year binLonger-year binYour cutoff

Logarithmic horizontal scale, 0.05 to 1 billion days. Each histogram uses its own peak height so shapes can be compared. A bin crossing your cutoff is split at the line; exact percentages use each planet's value. Missing periods and limits are excluded from plots and percentages.

All methods

The missing worlds

A catalogue is a view through an instrument.

Transits reveal a planet when it crosses its star and dims the light. Close-in worlds repeat that signal more often, and their orbits are more likely to line up for us. The big pile of short years reflects that search advantage as well as the planets that exist.

Why look now?

TESS just passed 1,000 confirmed worlds.

NASA announced the milestone this October. This snapshot contains 1,012 TESS discoveries and 6,451 confirmed planets in total. A growing census still has blind spots: changing the search method changes the population we can see.

Read NASA's milestone report

02 / Every world behind the picture

The planet register.

Search within the discovery-year and selected-method filters above. Bounds and missing periods remain visible here. Planet names open NASA's system record.

Planet or host starSort records

Open the records

Planet	Year length, days	Period status	Discovery	Method	Facility

Sources and counting notes

NASA Exoplanet Archive, Planetary Systems Composite Parameters (pscomppars), retrieved 24 October 2026. One row per confirmed planet, compiled from multiple literature references. Reproduce the data query.
NASA field definitions. The 6,451 rows include 6,091 positive period values with flag 0, six lower limits (flag -1), and 354 missing periods. No missing value is treated as zero. Percentages use only flag-0 periods and strict less-than comparisons. Values are reported estimates, not uncertainty-free measurements.
NASA: how we discover worlds explains observational bias. Removing Transit removes only that literal discovery label; Transit Timing Variations stays. Neither view estimates how common these planets are in the galaxy.
JPL planetary parameters, sidereal orbital periods converted from Julian years to days and rounded: Mercury 87.969, Earth 365.256, Jupiter 4,332.589. The default headline rounds 82.65% to 83%.

The CSV contains the complete frozen snapshot regardless of screen filters, with period limit flags and a retrieval date. The discovery-year slider filters the current record; the 2026 slice is a partial year.