If you examine our solar system’s giant planets, you’ll notice right away that they’ve all got moons—a lot of moons. While ...

An illustration of what it might look like to visit Kepler 16 b, a nearby exoplanet with twin suns. Credit: NASA Imagine a planet where molten diamond rains from the sky, hurled sideways by winds that ...

Exoplanets are planets outside Earth's solar system. In 1995, a gas giant named 51 Pegasi b, which orbits a star similar to Earth's sun, etched its name in history as the first exoplanet ever ...

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 ...

Three decades ago, in 1995, humankind discovered the first planet beyond the borders of our solar system. It's called 51 Pegasi b, and it spins around its main-sequence star (meaning not unlike our ...

Are we alone in the universe? Are we alone in the universe? The search for exoplanets—planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system—is helping scientists get closer to an answer. From hot Jupiters to ...

Just decades after the first exoplanets were identified, our database of the distant worlds—monitored by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute—has breached a new threshold. Now, astronomers have ...

Since then, astrophysicists have found more of these “exoplanets” — including some Earth-like worlds that exist in their star’s habitable zone. Today, astronomy has moved far beyond pointing a lens at ...

NASA has confirmed 6,000 exoplanets, marking a major milestone in humanity’s quest to understand other worlds. From gas giants hugging their stars to planets covered in lava or clouds of gemstones, ...

Measurements of the masses of exoplanets orbiting a young star have identified a system of low-density ‘super-puff’ planets. Read the paper: A young progenitor for the most common planetary systems in ...

Thirty years ago this week, two Swiss astronomers announced that they had spotted the first known planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The Nobel-winning discovery, later published in the pages of Nature, ...