— -- Astronomers on Monday reported the discovery of an Earth-like planet outside the solar system whose size and distance from its own star put it in the "habitable" zone and make for a surface ...

There’s a rule of thumb that can come in handy when you hear about new planet discoveries from the Kepler space mission. If they’re talking about a handful of new worlds orbiting distant stars, it’s ...

Thirty years ago this week, two Swiss astronomers announced that they had spotted the first known planet orbiting a Sun-like ...

May the faint chemical signals drifting through the atmosphere of a distant world be the long-sought message that we are not alone. Astronomers have reported seeing an unusual and strong combination ...

Astronomers call it KOI-134, and it's a star located 3,747 light-years away from Earth. Despite the huge distance that separates us, we've known it was there for more than a decade now, ever since the ...

Space scientists look back on 30 years of exoplanet discoveries — from rows of massive ‘super-Earths‘ to worlds with ...

The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the most exciting frontiers of modern science. Thanks to recent discoveries of exoplanets like Gliese 581 g, Kepler-22 b, Kepler-186 f, and Kepler-452 b, ...

Exoplanet hunters Christopher Watson and Annelies Mortier explain the long search for a 'twin Earth' capable of sustaining ...

It's several times larger than Earth and 600 light years away, but a newly discovered planet, Kepler-22b, is also said to be 72 degrees--and NASA's Kepler mission has named it as a planet that's just ...

Space-watchers saw the handwriting on the wall months ago, but now it’s official: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, by far the most successful planet-hunting telescope in history, isn’t coming back. Engineers ...