Extrasolar Planets
Zooniverse Reaches One Million Volunteers
Zooniverse — the renowned home of citizen science projects — is now one million strong. That’s one million registered volunteers…
New Technique Puts Exoplanets on the Scale
Astronomers constantly probe the skies for the unexpected. They search for unforeseen bumps in their data — signaling an unknown…
High Potential for Life Circling Alpha Centauri B, our Nearest Neighbor
While exoplanets make the news on an almost daily basis, one of the biggest announcements occurred in 2012 when astronomers…
‘Wobbly’ Alien Planet Has Weird Seasons And Orbits Two Stars
We're lucky to live on a planet where it's predictably warmer in the summer and colder in the winter in…
Super-Earths Could Be More ‘Superhabitable’ Than Planets Like Ours
Alien planets that are slightly bigger than Earth could be more life-friendly than exoplanets closer to our own size, a new study…
Young Planets Migrated In Double-Star Systems, Model Shows
Binary star systems are downright dangerous due to their complex gravitational interactions that can easily grind a planet to pieces.…
Nearby Brown Dwarf Captured in a Direct Image
A recent find announced by astronomers may go a long ways towards understanding a crucial “missing link” between planets and…
Super-sensitive Camera Captures a Direct Image of an Exoplanet
The world's newest and most powerful exoplanet imaging instrument, the recently-installed Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the 8-meter Gemini South…
Kepler Finds an Earth-Sized “Gas Giant”
Gas planets aren't always bloated, monstrous worlds the size of Jupiter or Saturn (or larger) they can also apparently be…
How Scientists Confirmed The Mass Of An Invisible Exoplanet
Planets are so very tiny next to stars outside of the solar system, making it really hard to spot exoplanets…