NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope confirmed more than 2,600 exoplanets, including several located in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water could exist. Worlds like Kepler-186f, Kepler-452b, and ...

Although astronomers have directly imaged a few dozen gas giants on the scale of Jupiter, Earth-sized planets are too small and dim to be directly imaged. That's not to say there's a shortage of Earth ...

Relative sizes of the newly discovered habitable-zone planets and Earth. Left to right: Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Earth (except for Earth, these are artists' renditions). Image credit: ...

Astronomers call it KOI-134, and it's a star located 3,747 light-years away from Earth. Despite the huge distance that separates us, we've known it was there for more than a decade now, ever since the ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that ...

Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using observations from NASA missions of orbiting planets crossing their stars’ faces. The model builds on a ...