Related topics: planets · liquid water · solar system · nasa · stars

Habitable exoplanets are bad news for humanity

Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting ...

50 new exoplanets discovered by HARPS

Astronomers using ESO's world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced a rich haul of more than 50 new exoplanets, including 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star. By ...

2016—the year in space and astronomy

The achievements of astrophysicists this year were as groundbreaking as they were varied. From reuniting a lander with a mothership on a comet, to seeing the most extreme cosmic events with gravitational waves, 2016 was truly ...

Habitable planets and white dwarfs

(PhysOrg.com) -- The search for habitable planets similar to Earth has routinely focused around active nuclear burning stars. However, in a recently published paper by Eric Agol from the University of Washington, the idea ...

Red dwarf stars might be best places to discover alien life

Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe, and nearly every one of these stars may have a planet located in its habitable zone where life has the best chance of existing, a new study concludes.

Space weather discovery puts 'habitable planets' at risk

A discovery that links stellar flares with radio-burst signatures will make it easier for astronomers to detect space weather around nearby stars outside the Solar System. Unfortunately, the first weather reports from our ...

Very Large Telescope Interferometer detects exozodiacal light

By using the full power of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer an international team of astronomers has discovered exozodiacal light close to the habitable zones around nine nearby stars. This light is starlight reflected ...

Day of discovery: 7 Earth-size planets

Newspapers around the world printed the discovery on their front pages: Astronomers had found that a red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 was home to a close-knit family of seven Earth-size planets. NASA announced the system ...

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