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 ...

Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaiʻi have discovered a massive planet and a brown dwarf orbiting distant stars.

Lurking further from its stars than Neptune is from the Sun, this is no inner planet, but it’s on a scale we recognize, ...

A newly discovered “super-Earth” planet could allow us to finally see alien life, researchers say. The world – named GJ 251 c and lying less than 20 light years away – is thought to be a “super Earth” ...

Astronomers have discovered the raw ingredients of planets orbiting two infant stars, offering a glimpse into how new worlds take shape. These building blocks, called “pebbles,” are tiny solid chunks ...

In a discovery that's fit for a movie, Northwestern University astronomers have directly imaged a Tatooine-like exoplanet, orbiting two suns. While obtaining an image of a planet beyond our solar ...

Astronomers have discovered two gas giant planets orbiting stars in the Beehive cluster, a collection of about 1,000 tightly packed stars. The planets are the first ever found around sun-like stars in ...

They didn’t use a space telescope, or a huge ground-based scope like the Keck or the Gemini, or even the sort of backyard telescope some planet hunters rely on to gather evidence of alien worlds.

New technology has been crucial in uncovering new planets and their secrets, and it will be crucial in finally beginning to uncover how peculiar, or not, our own planet actually is. Ewine van Dishoeck ...

The number of confirmed planets outside of our solar system—known as exoplanets—has risen to 6,000, NASA has said. There is huge variety across these distant worlds, the space agency says, with ...

This artist’s impression shows Cha 1107-7626. Located about 620 light-years away, this rogue planet is about 5-10 times more massive than Jupiter and doesn’t orbit a star. It is eating up material ...

NASA's Kepler mission, which has been searching the skies for Earth-like planets since 2009, has confirmed the discovery of a whopping 715 new planets orbiting around 305 stars. That bring the count ...