Thirty years ago, astronomers didn’t know if planets around other stars were common. Today, NASA says we’ve confirmed 6,000 ...

May the faint chemical signals drifting through the atmosphere of a distant world be the long-sought message that we are not alone. Astronomers have reported seeing an unusual and strong combination ...

Since astronomers found the first planets outside our solar system in 1992 and the first planet around a sunlike star in 1995 ...

A research team led by Ph.D. candidate Wang Haozhi under the supervision of Prof. Ali Esamdin at the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has revealed the ...

NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary. Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday. Already well past its ...

At this time last year, the scientists working on Kepler, NASA’s fantastically successful planet-hunting space telescope, were ecstatic. The probe, launched in 2009, had originally been given just ...

Space-watchers saw the handwriting on the wall months ago, but now it’s official: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, by far the most successful planet-hunting telescope in history, isn’t coming back. Engineers ...

The astronomy community has been buzzing lately with new discoveries from Kepler data that directly challenge our previous understanding of planetary orbits!

After three years of searching, scientists have caught the elusive phenomenon. — -- The "brilliant flash" that occurs when a star dies and explodes has been captured for the first time in visible ...

In this latest data mining, scientists unexpectedly discovered two planets with extremely unusual orbits, whose trajectories differ dramatically from the known patterns of planetary orbits. In our ...

Artists's rendering of the Kepler space telescope in orbit. (NASA image) Three wheels won't get your car very far, but three is apparently good enough for NASA's $550 million planet-finding Kepler ...