Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same…
The Automated Planet Finder is hunting planets all by itself.
Laurie Hatch
People around the world are being invited to learn how to hunt for planets, using two new online apps devised by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and UC Santa Cruz. The apps use data from…
The Gemini South telescope – pictured here – houses the latest gear to hunt down and snap photos of exoplanets.
Gemini Observatory
There is excitement in astronomy and planetary science departments worldwide as the new Gemini Planet Imager, housed in the Gemini South Telescope in the Chilean Andes, turns its razor-sharp gaze to the…
Astronomers didn’t know, 20 years ago, whether planets existed around any stars other than the Sun. All that changed in 1995 with the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi. And by the beginning…
Planetary science is beginning to catch up with science fiction. Since the launch of the Kepler space telescope in 2009, a deluge of planets outside of our solar system has been found, with many oddball…
Kepler 78b is a lot like Earth…if Earth was on fire.
TORLEY/Flickr
Two papers were published today in Nature, each independently revealing that a planet discovered by the Kepler mission is the closest thing we’ve found yet to another Earth. But don’t pack your bags just…
Rocky, water-rich asteroids and similar objects likely delivered the bulk of water on
Earth. Now they’re being found well outside our Solar system.
Mark A. Garlick, space-art.co.uk, University of Warwick and University of Cambridge
How will future alien scientists know whether life existed in our solar system? One method may be to sift through the planetary debris left when our sun becomes a white dwarf. Astronomers are doing just…
Not just a pretty planet – Jupiter may provide clues for detecting Earth-like planets.
NASA
Thanks to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, we’ve recently heard a great deal about how the Earth’s climate is changing. The IPCC’s cautious assessment of the…
Earth is the only planet in our solar system with a long-term, stable supply of liquid water – essential for the formation and evolution of all organic life. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t other pockets…
New analysis suggests yes, Fomalhaut b is real after all.
NASA
A new study of data from NASA’s Hubble telescope shows that the distant star Fomalhaut b really is a massive exoplanet and squashes claims made last year that it was just a dust cloud, researchers said…
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our own sun and appears to be home to at least one planet.
EPA/Davide De Martin/ESO
Earlier this week, a Swiss-based team searching for planets outside our solar system (exoplanets) published a paper in Nature announcing the detection of an Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri…
Many exoplanets have been found, but there’s plenty left to uncover.
Dallas1200am
Over the past few months, NASA’s Kepler mission has repeatedly made headlines with announcements of new and unusual planetary systems around other stars. To name a few, we’ve had the most densely packed…
A distant planet that made its name as the world’s first directly photographed exoplanet is at the centre of an astronomical stoush, after it veered off course and new doubts were raised about its existence…
A would-be Jedi waits for Kepler in a galaxy far, far away.
It’s one of the most famous and evocative images in cinematic history – Luke Skywalker gazing out at the twin suns of Tatooine as they set, in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope. Such a view would…
Are we getting closer to solving one of life’s greatest mysteries?
jcoterhals
During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly…
An artist’s impression of one of 16 new super-Earths recently found. This one orbits the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail).
ESO/M. Kornmesser
European astronomers have found 50 distant planets orbiting stars and 16 rocky “super-Earths”, planets that theoretically could support life. Expolanets, which orbit stars outside our solar system, were…
Artistic view of a close-up of a supermassive black hole. This image shows the material surrounding the black hole, which ultimately will fall in the central region releasing the X-ray radiation detected in this work.
NASA/CXC/A.Hobart
Astrophysicists have discovered black holes that formed up to 12.5 billion years ago – among the oldest examples of the phenomena ever seen. Black holes are objects in the Universe where a large amount…