Somewhere out there, just maybe, an alien – probably stranger looking than in our wildest imagination – might be pondering this very question.
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Articles on Exoplanets
Displaying 1 - 20 of 130 articles
Beyond the outer edge of the Solar System, mysterious, unknown worlds await by the thousands. Astronomers can now finally find them and explore them - but will we find another Earth?
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz thought it would take years to find a planet outside the solar system – they did it in months.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics went to a cosmologist who helped unlock the secrets of the Big Bang's aftermath, and two astronomers who found a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a nearby star.
Scientists who discovered planets in far off stellar systems and the fundamentals of the Big Bang Theory have earned the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The discovery of a huge planet orbiting a small star challenges our understanding of planet formation.
K2-18 b is now the exoplanet most likely to be habitable.
The geological and biological archives of the Earth shed light on both the distant past of our planet and allow us to imagine its future.
It is always exciting to discover new planets beyond our Solar System. Now a planetary astrophysicist is using a star's chemistry to predict which ones are likely to host giant planets.
Astronomers have found the first observational evidence for a disc of material around a giant young planet at a distant star. It's a place they think moons can form.
Science is full of surprises. While searching for planets orbiting nearby stars, researchers stumbled across the remains of a star that once outshone the Sun.
The ancient question 'Are we alone?' has graduated from being a philosophical musing to a testable hypothesis. We should be prepared for an answer.
Exoplanet discovery can help us work out how the Earth will end its days.
Life could exist in another solar system in a different part our galaxy. Or in another galaxy far away. We don't have the perfect technology yet to study such far away places but we're still trying.
The new planet is believed to be orbiting Barnard's Star, a red dwarf that's not visible to the naked eye but one of the closest stars to our Solar System.
There are probably more than a million planets in the universe for every single grain of sand on Earth. That's a lot of planets. My guess is that there probably is life elsewhere in the Universe.
A moon has been spotted in a star system 4000 light years away – but its structure is confusing.
Anish Kapoor made “Cloud Gate”, a giant bean-shaped mirror in Chicago. Visitors play with the light in the city and its surroundings, where our future lays.
We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
Life could have evolved on exoplanets Kepler-452b and Kepler-62e, according to a new study.
Top contributors
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Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
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Professor (Physics), University of Southern Queensland
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Professor of Astrophysics Education, The Open University
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Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland
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Postdoc astrophysicist, Mississippi State University
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Associate Professor, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
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PhD Candidate, University of Southern Queensland
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Professor and Associate Dean (Research), UNSW
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Program Manager / Adjunct Research Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
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Associate Professor and Research Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
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W J McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas at Austin
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Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria
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Space Plasma Physicist, Queen Mary University of London
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Researcher at Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
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Alice Gorman is a Friend of The Conversation.
Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
