Related topics: stars · planets · spacecraft · comet

Robotically discovering Earth's nearest neighbors

A team of astronomers using ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, California, and Arizona recently discovered a planetary system orbiting a nearby star that is only 54 light-years away. All three planets orbit their star at ...

Tau Ceti: The next Earth? Probably not

As the search continues for Earth-size planets orbiting at just the right distance from their star, a region termed the habitable zone, the number of potentially life-supporting planets grows. In two decades we have progressed ...

Extrasolar storms: How's the weather way out there?

Orbiting the Earth 353 miles above the ground, the Hubble Space Telescope silently pivots toward its new target. At the same time, flying 93 million miles away in interplanetary space, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope receives ...

Planets with oddball orbits like Mercury could host life

Mercury has an oddball orbit—it takes longer for it to rotate on its axis and complete a day than it takes to orbit the sun and complete a year. Now, researchers suggest photosynthesis could take place on an alien planet ...

Under the bright lights of an aging sun

Life as we know it on Earth is linked to our star, the Sun, which provides our planet with just the right amount of heat and energy for liquid water to be stable in our lakes, rivers and oceans. However, as the Sun ages, ...

The science of lightning in extrasolar planets

Scientists in Scotland are hoping to make a major 'leap' in working out whether a bolt of lightning could trigger life on planets outside the solar system.

Scientists detect water around a hot Jupiter

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of a research team that has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. The team, including scientists from California Institute ...

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