Exoplanets
We may be unique as a race, but it seems more and more evidence keeps piling up against the how special our planet Earth is. The latest study out of NASA's Kepler mission data reveals that as many as one in five sun-like stars contain Earth-like planets.
Scientists scanning the skies have located a small exoplanet with Earth-like characteristics except for one detail: it's scorching hot.
Scientists using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii have stumbled upon evidence of water in the remnants of an extrasolar body orbiting a white dwarf star, marking the first time water has been discovered on a rocky body.
NASA's ever-peering eye into the heavens, the Hubble Space Telescope, has found a distant planet whose blue hue could be the result of glass rain.
There could potentially be more than double the number of habitable exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars out there thanks to clouds, asserts a new study. If the assumption holds true, then there could potentially be 60 billion habitable planets in our Milky Way alone.
While NASA's Kepler spacecraft usually grabs all the planet-hunting headlines, today it's the European Space Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope. The ESO is reporting that it has directly observed the smallest planet outside of solar system, a mere 300 light-years away from us.
Two rare stellar alignments over the next few years will give planet hunters a rare chance at exploring Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun. NASA plans to pull out the big guns, and utilize the Hubble Space Telescope in an effort to locate Earth-sized planets around the relatively close red dwarf star.
New research into the weather patterns of Uranus and Neptune indicates that their ferocious winds exist in a thin, separate layer from the rest of the ice giants. The findings suggest that giant planets may mostly be static on the inside, veiled by a layer of chaos.
NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, is in serious trouble.
As the search for Earth-like planets continues, scientists from Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cfa) have taken another step forward by discovering exoplanet Kepler-76b with a new method utilizing Einstein's theory of relativity.
Despite the fact that Earth-like planets in habitable zones are being identified at a faster and faster rate, there's still no confirmation that life exists or could exist on any of them. One scientist is arguing that's because we need to think outside the box more.
Scientists from NASA's Kepler mission peering into solar systems 1,200 light-years away have uncovered three more supersized Earthlike planets located in the star's habitable zone.
Researchers utilizing data from NASA's Kepler mission have realized that at around 17 percent of all stars have an Earth-sized planet orbiting them.
Thanks to the efforts of forty volunteers scouring through NASA's Kepler mission data, fifteen previously undiscovered planets have been found in habitable regions of space.
It may not be too long before we discover a planet that shares key characteristics with Earth.
