Move over exoplanets, exomoons may harbour life too

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 ...

Lobster-shaped extrasolar oceans

Alien planets circling the most common stars in the universe may often have strange lobster-shaped oceans on their surfaces, researchers in China now say.

Every red dwarf star has at least one planet

Three new planets classified as habitable-zone super-Earths are amongst eight new planets discovered orbiting nearby red dwarf stars by an international team of astronomers from the UK and Chile.

Could Jupiter become a star?

NASA's Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, and proceeded to study the giant planet for almost 8 years. It sent back a tremendous amount of scientific information that revolutionized our understanding ...

Kepler finds a very wobbly planet

(Phys.org) —Imagine living on a planet with seasons so erratic you would hardly know whether to wear Bermuda shorts or a heavy overcoat. That is the situation on a weird, wobbly world found by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler ...

Newfound planet is Earth-mass but gassy

An international team of astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured. Surprisingly, ...

Companion's comets the key to curious exoplanet system?

(Phys.org) —The nearby star Fomalhaut A hosts the most famous planetary system outside our own Solar System, containing both an exoplanet and a spectacular ring of comets. Today, an international team of astronomers announced ...

SPIRou: New tool may unveil inhabitable worlds

Funding for SPIRou, a spectropolarimeter and a high-precision velocimeter optimized for both the detection of habitable Earth twins orbiting around nearby red dwarf stars and the study of the formation of Sun-like stars and ...

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