14-01-08 After nearly a decade of development, construction and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets orbiting around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds. Even these earl...

13-11-26 Scientists should take the conservative approach when searching for habitable zones where life-sustaining planets might exist, according to James Kasting, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, including when building Terrestrial Planet F...

13-05-20 Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint（模糊的） , and close to their stars. The two most prolific（丰富的） techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling摇晃的 stars) and tr...

13-05-20 What is the long-range weather forecast for the giant planets Uranus and Neptune? These planets are home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, hurricane-like storms as large around as Earth, immense weather systems that last for y...

13-04-27 A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar（星际的） neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host. Characterization by proxy is the technique...

13-03-06 New theoretical modeling by Carnegie's Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our solar system -- Jupiter and Saturn -- might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by the Astrophysical Journal. New stars are surr...

13-01-09 Comets trailing wispy（纤细的） tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble. The discovery by astronomers at the Universi...

12-12-26 Scattered around the Milky Way are stars that resemble our own sun -- but a new study is finding that any planets orbiting those stars may very well be hotter and more dynamic（有活力的） than Earth. That's because the interiors of any terrestrial p...

12-11-12 Astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth in the habitable zone, where liquid water and a stable atmosphere could reside, around the nearby star HD 40307. It is one of three new super-Earths found around the star that has three other low-mass pl...

12-11-05 Solar systems with life-bearing planets may be rare if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid（小行星） belts of just the right mass, according to a study by Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and...