In a remarkable feat of astronomical discovery, scientists have identified a new exoplanet similar in size to Earth, but with one notable difference: it is covered in vast, glowing lava oceans. This ...

On Earth, water is so intertwined with life that our search for life on other worlds is essentially a search for water. When scientists find exoplanets around distant stars, a primary consideration is ...

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky ...

A FIERY hell-world that would instantly roast visitors alive has a vast lava ocean – and may be packed with rare gems. The ...

An exoplanet orbiting a dwarf star 124 light-years from Earth made headlines around the world in April 2025. Researchers at the University of Cambridge reported that planet K2-18b could be a marine ...

Data suggests K2-18b is a "world with an ocean that is teeming with life," said study lead author Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England. A whopping 8.6 times ...

"Life can be understood as complexity, and water has a wide range of properties that enable this complexity." Scientists have developed a better model to understand "steam worlds," which are planets ...

A new study modeled the chemistry of TOI-270 d, an exoplanet between Earth and Neptune in size, finding evidence that it could be a giant rocky planet shrouded in a thick, hot atmosphere. TOI-270 d is ...

An illustration shows what exoplanet K2-18b might look like based on data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. K2-18b is 8.6 times as massive as Earth, orbits the cool dwarf star K2-18 in the ...

How can identifying land on exoplanets help scientists better understand whether an exoplanet could harbor life? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a team of researchers ...