NASA has taken a bold step in the search for alien life beyond Earth. The space agency announced the selection of seven advanced technology partners for its next major mission, the Habitable Worlds ...

Planets that once lived only in pulp novels and movie concept art are now turning up in real data. Astronomers are not just finding distant worlds, they are cataloguing places with molten surfaces, ...

It’s a sweltering Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the kind of day that stretches the definition of Earth as a “habitable” planet. But on an eighth-floor terrace near the U.S. Capitol building, dozens of ...

Have you ever wondered how to make water from scratch? Exoplanets orbing other stars may have cooked up a new recipe. Manufacturing water is a relatively simple chemical process, albeit a dangerous ...

Atmospheric insights into alien worlds emerge as JWST studies filtered starlight passing through distant exoplanet atmospheres. Pixabay, Vilkasss The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) represents a ...

Astronomers have spotted more than 100 new potential alien planets, including one in the fourth-closest star system to the sun, a new study reports. This haul of newfound possible exoplanets, which ...

Thanks to theorists like Ruth Murray-Clay, astronomers are decoding how distant planets form, evolve, and maybe even host life. When Ruth Murray-Clay entered graduate school, only a handful of ...

Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there are about 1,560 stars, likely orbited by several thousand planets. About a thousand of these extrasolar planets — known as exoplanets — may be rocky and ...

Space scientists look back on 30 years of exoplanet discoveries — from rows of massive ‘super-Earths‘ to worlds with perfectly synchronized orbits. It was also the start of a whirlwind of discovery.

Astronomers have detected a smelly gas best known for the odor of rotten eggs—hydrogen sulfide—in the atmospheres of four giant planets far beyond our solar system. While the gas may be unpleasant on ...

But the real truth is that alien life on other planets could be even stranger than floating balloons or amorphous organisms ...