If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that’s because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far. This animation made by Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, shows all 2299 of the most likely planetary candidates [...]

To understand Mars we need to understand its on-again off-again tango with liquid water. It’s not just the search for past or present life on Mars that hinges on this, but the search for a complete chemical, geophysical, and climatological history of the red planet. Water is such a potent agent for topographical and mineralogical [...]

Warning: Exoplanets may appear less massive than they really are (images used: Eysteinn Guðni Guðnason and NASA/Kepler) Exoplanets can be confusing things. Recently we’ve seem the announcement of a milestone for NASA’s Kepler mission with the confirmation of a planet in the habitable zone of its Sun-like star. The planet, Kepler 22-b, has a diameter [...]

Today sees the announcement that one of the “candidate” planets listed from NASA’s Kepler mission back in February is now confirmed, and it’s a key one. At 2.4 times the diameter of the Earth the planet Kepler 22-b also orbits its parent star (which is a slightly less massive G-dwarf star than the Sun and [...]