In our solar system, Earth is one of but eight planets – nine, if you really want to count Pluto – and the only one remotely hospitable to life. And as technology advances, astronomers only expect to ...

Detecting exoplanets at all is difficult—they typically emit much less than 1% of a host star's brightness. Eclipse mapping requires measuring small fractions of that total as a planet circles behind ...

The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to study 25 hot Jupiters. It has helped to answer "questions important to our ...

Just decades after the first exoplanets were identified, our database of the distant worlds—monitored by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute—has breached a new threshold. Now, astronomers have ...

Thirty years ago this week, two Swiss astronomers announced that they had spotted the first known planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The Nobel-winning discovery, later published in the pages of Nature, ...

The team of astronomers behind the find suggested it could help us better understand planet and moon formation in our solar system and beyond the Milky Way. The team was able to make the first-ever ...

"It was just a matter of time before we found them." Thirty years ago, on Oct. 6, 1995, the very first exoplanet to be discovered around a sun-like star was revealed. Called 51 Pegasi b, it was a ...

With the discovery of ever more exoplanets—over 6,000 now—scientists, of course, want to know if they are habitable for life. (At least, life as we know it.) But assessing habitability is a difficult ...

Scientists have recently uncovered a fascinating new exoplanet a mere 30 light-years away from our solar system. What sets this celestial body apart is its intriguing orbit around not one, but two ...

Exoplanets are planets outside Earth's solar system. In 1995, a gas giant named 51 Pegasi b, which orbits a star similar to Earth's sun, etched its name in history as the first exoplanet ever ...