On Feb. 22, astronomers announced that the ultra-cool dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, hosts a total of seven Earth-size planets that are likely rocky, a discovery made by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in ...

It's easy to imagine clone armies, lightsabers, and starships on some of these very real planets.

When evaluating possible planets out of the thousands out there, explained Prof. Bean, scientists look for liquid water as a main guiding principle. “All life on Earth needs liquid water, no matter ...

The unusual system of three “super puff” planets has at least one more planet, revealed by its gravitational tug on other planets An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density ...

Anyone who's ever tried to make a perfect snowball has some inkling how difficult it is to create a sphere. Even nature has a hard time of it. But a star discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission, dubbed ...

Explore the evolving rare earth hypothesis, highlighting new findings on habitability and the conditions for complex life on ...

How many exoplanets are in the cosmos and what can they tell us about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an ...

Scientists have discovered a distant solar system very much like our own, in which the orbits of all known planets lie in nearly the same plane and are aligned with the star's rotation. In recent ...