Gaian bottleneck means alien life never persists, say Oz astrobiologists
Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by astrobiologists…
NASA discover Earth’s twin 1,400 light-years away
The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet – called Kepler-452b – in the “habitable zone” around a G2…
Locate alien civilizations by their pollution, suggest astrophysicists
Harvard-Smithsonian scientists speculate that little green men may not be “green” at all, and finding them might be a simple…
Newly discovered neighboring star as cold as the North Pole
Discovered using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes, a brown dwarf star only 7.2 light years…
New analysis reveals hidden planetary disks
The two images at top reveal debris disks around young stars uncovered in archival images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space…
Kepler mission identifies most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered
An international team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a new rocky planet the same size as Earth that…
Wobbly planets could be best place for finding life, say astrobiologists
Pivoting planets that lean one way and then change orientation within a relatively short time period might be surprisingly habitable.…
Newly discovered dwarf planet hints at a much larger not-yet-seen planet
2012 VP113, a newly discovered dwarf planet (pictured) in the distant Oort cloud region of our Solar System indicates the…
Work by celestial archaeologists hints at Earth’s ultimate fate
For decades, astronomers have known that the atmospheres surrounding stars are often “polluted” with elements like carbon, silicon, and iron.…
Solar wind creating interplanetary rain
Scientists have discovered that when tiny interplanetary dust particles are battered by the solar wind, the ion bombardment can free…
First exoplanet images from Gemini
After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world’s most advanced instrument for directly imaging planets around other…
Bolivian park most biodiverse area on planet
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) says Madidi National Park in northwest Bolivia may be the most biologically diverse place on…
Beetles reveal ecological speciation in action
Tiny leaf beetles that flit among the maple and willow trees in Vermont are providing scientists with some of the…
Telescope Tag-Team Nets New Planets
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) have confirmed the extrasolar (outside our solar system) planet…
Stormy Times For Uranus
Two billion miles away in the atmosphere of Uranus, a dark vortex large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United…
Earth’s Cousin Only 15 Light Years Away
Astronomers from the Ames Research Center and the University of California have discovered the most Earth-like planet yet, located only…
First Photo Of Planet Outside Our Solar System
A team of astronomers has confirmed the discovery of a giant extra-solar planet, approximately five times the mass of Jupiter,…
Mars-like Soils Can Harbor Life
Chile’s Atacama desert gets rain perhaps once a decade and scientists believed that the driest Atacama soils were sterile. But…