For generations, artists and science-fiction writers have imagined alien landscapes beneath twin sunsets. The image became iconic in popular culture long before astronomers confirmed that planets ...

A privately funded space telescope with a mirror larger than Hubble’s could soon investigate 27 distant giant planets using a ...

For the first time, astronomers have seen the glow of alien planets circling sun-like stars. “This is a new era,” says the leader of one of the teams, Drake Deming from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight ...

Astronomers have narrowed down the cosmic search for life, identifying fewer than 50 rocky planets among thousands of known exoplanets that may have the right conditions to support life. Using new ...

FOR the first time, astronomers have seen the glow of alien planets circling sun-like stars. “This is a new era,” says the leader of one of the teams, Drake Deming from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight ...

This summer, exoplanet science—the study of planets orbiting stars beyond our sun—took a big step forward. Reports of helium gas escaping from the atmosphere of LHS 1140b propelled this exoplanet from ...

The green colour of Earth's forests is not accidental. Plants contain chlorophyll, a pigment that absorbs red and blue wavelengths of sunlight while reflecting green light. This process allows plants ...

Using the Keck Observatory, astronomers measured the spins of dozens of giant planets and brown dwarfs orbiting distant stars. They found that giant planets can spin faster than much more massive ...

A NASA team is advancing a bold new proposal to search for alien worlds by staging an artificial eclipse in space, positioning a huge ‘starshade’ about 175,000 kilometres above Earths. Razor ...

The newly discovered exoplanets, designated as GJ 9827 b, c and d, are located fairly close to their host star, completing orbits within 6.2 days. ESO A nearby 'super‑Earth' just 25 light years from ...