Hubble spots water on distant exoplanets
Peering into the atmospheres of planets many trillions of miles away using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have found the…
Water discovered in remnants of destroyed exoplanet
Astrophysicists have found the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body outside our solar system in its shattered remains…
Exoplanet has its clouds mapped
NASA scientists using data from the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet…
A blue planet where it rains glass
Astronomers making visible-light observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have deduced the actual color of a planet orbiting another star…
Lots more habitable planets out there, thanks to clouds
‘ An intriguing new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable…
Nearby star may have 3 habitable planets
Astronomers have announced that the star Gliese 667C in the constellation of Scorpius is likely orbited by between five and…
New technique for finding distant planets makes its first discovery
For the first time, astrophysicists from Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered an exoplanet using…
Hubble identifies Earth-like debris in white dwarfs’ atmospheres
The Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a…
First discovery of extraterrestrial life will likely be around a white dwarf star, say astrophysicists
Detecting extraterrestrial life from tell-tale atmospheric signatures is much easier to do when the planet under observation is orbiting a…
Habitable planets galore, suggests Kepler data-crunching
A detailed analysis of the first three years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission, which already has discovered thousands of…
Radioactive elements may make extraterrestrial life more likely on exoplanets
An abundance of radioactive elements observed in a number of distant solar systems would make the constituent planets much warmer,…
Earth-sized planet found nearby in Alpha Centauri system
Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have discovered a rocky planet about the same mass as Earth orbiting a…
Milky Way has “billions” of habitable planets
Working with data from telescopes located around the world, an international team of astronomers have shown that planets around stars…
Springtime on Earth II
The Kepler space telescope has identified a large, rocky exoplanet with a surface temperature of about 22 degrees Celsius (72…
First exoplanet with twin suns discovered
The discovery of exoplanet Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet – a planet orbiting not…
New optics capture exoplanet 63 million light years distant
New optical technology has allowed an international team of astronomers to obtain images of the exoplanet known as Beta Pictoris…
Expolanet storm winds blow at 10,000 kmh
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have measured a superstorm for the first time in the atmosphere of the…
Exoplanet orbit tracked
For the first time, astronomers have been able to directly follow the motion of an exoplanet as it moves to…
Astronomers cop an eyeful of giant planet’s demise
An international group of astrophysicists have been documenting how the massive exoplanet known as WASP-12b is being stretched, distorted and…
Exoplanets galore! Four distant planets imaged
A team of astronomers using the Keck and Gemini North telescopes in Hawaii have managed to image three planets in…
Polarization Technique Used To “See” Exoplanet
For the first time, astronomers have been able to detect and monitor the reflected visible light that is scattered in…
An Exoplanet With Liquid Water?
European astronomers say they have detected a distant Earth-like planet with conditions that might allow liquid water to exist. The…
Exoplanet Imager Takes Shape
NASA researchers have customized a space telescope with special masks and mirrors which they believe could allow it to take…