Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, USA, have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much ...
Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th century Polish astronomer and mathematician, wasn't the first to suggest that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe—the idea originated with the ancient Greeks—but he was the first to prove ...
With about 4,000 planet candidates from the Kepler Space Telescope data to analyze so far, astronomers are busy trying to figure out questions about habitability. What size planet could host life? How far from its star does ...
Scientists hunting for life beyond Earth have discovered more than 1,800 planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, in recent years, but so far, no one has been able to confirm an exomoon. Now, physicists from The University ...
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) was built for one purpose: imaging extrasolar planets. In the seven months since it came online, GPI is proving to be an order-of-magnitude improvement-so much so that it may rewrite the rules ...
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1994. Twenty years later, NASA's exoplanet catalog lists more than 1700 planets confirmed around other stars. Most of these extra-solar-systems have been measured by changes in light ...
Among the most sought-after prizes in astronomy these days are "exomoons," or moons orbiting exoplanets. Although astronomers have detected more than a thousand exoplanets, any exomoons they might harbor have so far eluded ...
As a species, human beings are obsessed with the idea that there may be aliens out there, somewhere beyond our planet.
(Phys.org) —A trio of space scientists has published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they suggest that current assumptions regarding using spectral signatures as a means to identify exoplanets ...
In the Star Wars universe, everyone's favourite furry aliens, the Ewoks, famously lived on the "forest moon of Endor". In scientific terms, the Ewok's home world would be referred to as an exomoon, which is simply a moon ...
