Hubble's celestial snow globe

It's beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe.

Imagining an Earthly neighbor

We do not yet know whether the sun-like stars closest to us, the α Centauri A/B binary, harbor an Earth-like planet. However, thanks to new modeling work, we now have a good sense of what such a planet, should it exist, ...

Old stars don't have hot Jupiters, suggests study

As we began to discover hundreds, then thousands of exoplanets, we found that there were two types of worlds unlike anything in our solar system. The first are super-Earths. These worlds straddle the line between large rocky ...

Do red dwarfs or sunlike stars have more Earth-sized worlds?

Earth is our only example of a habitable planet, so it makes sense to search for Earth-size worlds when we're hunting for potentially-habitable exoplanets. When astronomers found seven of them orbiting a red dwarf star in ...

Life can thrive around even the smallest stars, study claims

Photosynthesis is probably the most important chemical reaction for life on Earth. It is the process plants use to transform sunlight into energy it can use. Through it, plants can produce carbohydrates they can use (and ...

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