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A Place for Alien Life? Kepler Mission Discovers Earth’s Older Cousin,...
Scientists say NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has discovered Earth's "older, bigger first cousin" – a planet that's about 60 percent bigger than our own, circling a sunlike star in an orbit that could...
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Watch This Amazing Video of an Exoplanet in Motion
Exoplanet Beta Pic b orbiting Beta Pictoris from Dunlap Institute on Vimeo.Just. Wow. The motion of an alien world, reduced to a looping .gif. We truly live in an amazing age. A joint press release out...
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More livable than Earth? New index sizes up the habitability of alien exoplanets
Researchers at the University of Washington's Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised a new habitability index for judging how suitable alien planets might be for life, and the top prospects on their...
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What’s Orbiting KIC 8462852 – Shattered Comet or Alien Megastructure?
"Bizarre." "Interesting." "Giant transit". That were the reactions of Planet Hunters project volunteers when they got their first look at the light curve of the otherwise normal sun-like star KIC...
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New Visualization Shows Incredible Variety of Extraterrestrial Worlds
Here’s a great new poster showing over 500 extrasolar planets (about one quarter of the total) that have been discovered since 1988. This visualization, created by graphic artist and writer Martin...
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Radio waves absent from the reputed megastructure-encompassed Kepler star?
Astronomers at the SETI institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) have reported their findings after monitoring the reputed megastructure-encompassed star KIC 8462852. No significant radio...
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A New “Mathematical” Definition Proposed for What Constitutes a Planet
In the current (heated) debate of what constitutes a planet, it seems everyone can agree at least one thing: The current definition put forth by the International Astronomical Union is actually quite...
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Sweet Sights for November Nights
Clear night ahead? Let's see what's up. We'll start close to home with the Moon, zoom out to lonely Fomalhaut 25 light years away and then return to our own Solar System to track down the 7th planet....
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Do Comets Explain Mystery Star’s Bizarre Behavior?
The story of KIC 8462852 appears far from over. You'll recall NASA's Kepler mission had monitored the star for four years, observing two unusual incidents, in 2011 and 2013, when its light dimmed in...
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Time-lapse Video Documents Assembly of Webb Telescope Primary Mirror
[caption id="attachment_126323" align="aligncenter" width="4758"] This overhead shot of the James Webb Space Telescope shows part of the installation of the 18 primary flight mirrors onto the telescope...
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First Super-Earth Atmosphere Detected
55 Cancri-e was once touted as one of the most exotic exo-planets ever discovered. Mass and radius modelling led some astronomers to speculate that its interior could be rich in carbon. And that much...
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ALMA Captures Never-Before-Seen Details of Protoplanetary Disk
TW Hydrae is a special star. Located 175 light years from Earth in the constellation Hydra the Water Snake, it sits at the center of a dense disk of gas and dust that astronomers think resembles our...
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Did the Sun Steal Planet Nine?
One of the biggest new mysteries in our Solar System is the purported presence of a large and distant "Planet Nine," traveling around the Sun in a twenty-thousand-year orbit far beyond Pluto. Although...
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Three New Earth-sized Planets Found Just 40 Light-Years Away
Three more potentially Earthlike worlds have been discovered in our galactic backyard, announced online today by the European Southern Observatory. Researchers using the 60-cm TRAPPIST telescope at...
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Friendly Giants Have Cozy Habitable Zones Too
It is an well-known fact that all stars have a lifespan. This begins with their formation, then continues through their Main Sequence phase (which constitutes the majority of their life) before ending...
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Webb Telescope Gets its Science Instruments Installed
The package of powerful science instruments at the heart of NASA’s mammoth James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been successfully installed into the telescopes structure. A team of two dozen...
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New System Discovered with Five Planets
NASA's planet-discovering Kepler mission suffered a major mechanical failure in May 2013, but thanks to innovative techniques subsequently implemented by astronomers the satellite continues to uncover...
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First Detection of Water Clouds Outside Our Solar System
Brown dwarfs – those not-quite-a-planet and not-quite-a-star objects – are intriguing oddities that are too low in mass to burn hydrogen, but are more massive than planets. They only emit a faint...
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Astronomers Discover Exoplanet With Triple Sunrises and Sunsets
In the famous scene from the Star Wars movie "A New Hope" we recall young Luke Skywalker contemplating his future in the light of a binary sunset on the planet Tatooine. Not so many years later in...
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Talk About A Crowded Neighborhood: Closest Binary Stars With Multiple Planets...
The more we look, the more we see the great diversity in planetary systems around other stars. And curiously, planet hunters are finding that most star systems are very different from our own. An...
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