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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

"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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. But look beyond our sun's gravitational pull into the ...