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 [...]

Understanding the structure, dynamics, and chemistry of planetary atmospheres is key to exoplanetary science. It’s sobering to realize that as of now it is still an enormous challenge to model even the atmospheres of planets in our own solar system. Despite great advances, a variety of trickery has to be employed to simulate a swirling [...]

Planets in habitable zones, planets orbiting twin suns, miniature solar systems, rogue planets, planets, planets, planets. If there is one single piece of information you should take away from the recent flood of incredible exoplanetary discoveries it is this: Our universe makes planets with extraordinary efficiency – if planets can form somewhere, they will. We’ve [...]

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 [...]

One of the biggest thrills of exoplanetary science is seeing how it combines the new and the old, with every discovery bringing startling perspective on the nature of our own very familiar solar system. I thought I’d dig out a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that helps illustrate this. A freshly edited version of [...]

In 1964 Stephen Dole published a hundred and seventy-four page document for a US Air Force project at the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, California. With not a little hubris it was titled “Habitable Planets for Man“, an extraordinarily detailed and prescient scientific study of the nature of worlds that might support life in the [...]

The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a [...]

LONG BEACH, Calif.—Yesterday I wrote about the excitement at the American Astronomical Meeting here about new exoplanet discoveries. Scientists working on the Kepler satellite announced the discovery of an additional 461 planet candidates, bringing the total to 2,740. What are these planets like? Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center [...]

LONG BEACH, Calif.—Look up on a starry night. Almost every one of those tiny pricks of light is home to an unseen world. Our Milky Way galaxy is full of planets—100 billion or more—and many of those planets are Earth-like rocks (although our solar system still appears to be an oddball). Such are the major [...]

“We are really in the age of discovery of new worlds.” That was Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, during a September 12 press conference in which European researchers announced the discovery of about 50 planets new to science. There are now 685 [...]

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, is one of the finest and most prolific machines ever built for seeking out worlds orbiting distant stars. And at an estimated cost of $600 million, it had better be. Now anyone can sift through a bit of Kepler’s voluminous data, obtained as the space telescope gazes at some [...]

Story 5 Astronauts from five different space agencies are participating in the CAVES project, an underground training exercise beneath the island of Sardinia. Links: Astronauts Heading Deep Underground for Spaceflight Training Story 4 Scientists have discovered a two-star solar system orbited by two planets, an astronomical first. Links: Two Alien Planets Found with Twin Suns [...]