A research team in Spain has the enviable job of testing out new electromechanical gear for potential use in future missions to the "Red Planet." They do it within their Mars environmental simulation chamber, which is specially designed to mimic conditions on the fourth planet from the sun -- right down to its infamous Martian dust.
A spacecraft that looks like a giant sunflower might one day be used to acquire images of Earth-like rocky planets around nearby stars. The prototype deployable structure, called a starshade, is being developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.
Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are - some evidence suggested they could be room temperature.
Many young stars known to host planets also possess disks containing dust and icy grains, particles produced by collisions among asteroids and comets also orbiting the star. These debris disks often show sharply defined rings or spiral patterns, features that could signal the presence of orbiting planets.
Gliese 667C is a very well-studied star. Just over one third of the mass of the Sun, it is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667 (also referred to as GJ 667), 22 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.
Our Milky Way galaxy is teeming with a wild variety of planets. In addition to our solar system's eight near-and-dear planets, there are more than 800 so-called exoplanets known to circle stars beyond our sun.
Researchers say they've conducted the first reconnaissance of a distant planetary system, collecting the spectra of four red exoplanets which orbit a star 128 light years away from Earth.
There's probably an Earth-sized planet with a comfortable temperature as little as 13 light years away, data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope implies.
Astronomers using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope have spotted a star that appears to be making new planets, despite being well past the age at which it would be expected to do so.
Astronomers believe they've found a large asteroid belt around Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies.
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered four new planets that are less than twice the size of Earth and which orbit in their star's habitable zone.
One of the closest stars to our own, Tau Ceti, appears to have five planets, including one that's in the so-called habitable zone and could be suitable for life.
Our solar system didn't, as previously thought, take twice as long as most to form, new research shows.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded funding to a project aimed at identifying Earth-like planets that could be capable of supporting life.
Astronomers have, for the first time, spotted planets orbiting sun-like stars in a crowded cluster - the best evidence yet that planets can form in dense stellar environments.
The center of the galaxy is not only a crowded place, it's blasted by shock waves, bathed in radiation and warped by owerful gravitational forces from the supermassive black hole at the region's heart.
There could be seven times as many potentially habitable planets as previously believed, Scottish scientists have calculated.
NASA's Kepler mission has for the first time discovered multiple planets orbiting a pair of stars, showing it's possible for more than one planet to be formed and survive in such a chaotic environment.