The five Earth-mass planet (seen in foreground - Gliese 581 c) is just inside the habitable zone. ... which says that life can force changes to a planet in order to keep it in a habitable state.

These planets are relatively low mass, ranging from 5 to 25 times the mass of the Earth. For comparison, Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and Uranus 15 times our mass.

In order for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to be orbiting where they are today, some simulations suggest, there was probably a fifth planet bouncing around with them at some point (SN: 5/5 ...

As long as there’s a view of the west and clear skies, anyone earthbound will have a chance to see the planets in the night sky. Venus will be easy to spot as its one of the brighter stars in ...

Intelligent life in our Milky Way Galaxy may have gotten a gigantic head start, say astronomers who confirmed the detection of low-mass, rocky planets around a star that’s at least 11.2 billion ...

The planets haven’t changed their mass, or their distance from the center of the solar system where the sun used to be, and if the sun and the black hole are the same mass, then the whole system ...

These findings are an important first step toward obtaining similar measurements for a large sample of exoplanets in order to search for statistical trends, the researchers said. ... Citation: “ High ...

The five inner planets are among the smallest for which mass and size have both been measured, ... We denote the planets in order of increasing distance from the star as Kepler-11b, ...

Is anybody home? Astronomers have pinpointed two planets orbiting a nearby star that meet pretty much every requirement for supporting life. They’re almost exactly the same mass as the Earth ...