Astronomers detect lowest-mass planet around a star like the sun found using direct imaging techniques.

A transmission spectrum made from a single observation from the Webb Space Telescope reveals atmospheric characteristics of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-96 b. 

The first planet to have its clouds mapped showed us what weather looked like on a planet outside our solar system.

The results from Kepler will come from measuring the brightness of the stars. The data will look like an EKG showing the heart beat. Whenever a planet passes in front of its parent star as viewed f...

This slide explains the three different types of black holes.

Planets having atmospheres rich in helium may be common in our galaxy, according to a new theory based on data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These planets would be around the mass of Neptune...

The Kepler mission found 1,284 new planets via the transit method. When a planet passes directly between its star and an observer, it dims the star's light by a measurable amount.

This infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope called a spectrum tells astronomers that a distant gas planet, a so-called "hot Jupiter" called HD 209458b, might be smothered with high cloud...

Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three extrasolar planets by an observational technique called micr...

This slide breaks down and explains what black holes are.

This image from the NACO system on ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows a candidate protoplanet in the disc of gas and dust around the young star HD100546.

The first extra-solar planet detected around a star similar to the Sun was 51 Peg. It has about the mass of Jupiter. But unlike Jupiter, which is five times as far from the Sun as Earth and orbits ...

Lurking beyond our solar system, among the billions of stars and the exoplanets that orbit them, is another sort of Milky Way altogether. Our "Galaxy of Horrors" reveals the sinister science behind...

Twenty years ago astronomers discovered the first planet around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b. This is the story of the pioneers in planet-hunting and how those who have followed are now poised to a...

The third closest star system to the sun, called WISE J104915.57-531906, is at the center of the larger image, which was taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It appeared to b...

For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent st...

If life exists on some of the exoplanets that Kepler finds, it may exist in forms similar to what we see in some of Earth's most extreme conditions.

This infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope tells astronomers that a distant gas planet, a so-called "hot Jupiter" called HD 189733b, might be smothered with high clouds. It is one of th...

The stars TESS studies are 30 to 100 times brighter than those the Kepler mission and K2 follow-up surveyed, enabling far easier follow-up observations with both ground-based and space-based telesc...

Animation of Kepler spacecraft slowly rotating in space.

This plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope indicates the presence of molecules in the planet WASP-12b -- a super-hot gas giant that orbits tightly around its star.

Illustration of Earth's surface as it might have looked 3.8 billion years ago.

Researchers have detected the first "exomoon" candidate -- a moon orbiting a planet that lies outside our solar system. Using a technique called "microlensing," they observed what could be either a...

Inverted image (dark stars on light sky) Stars in the image are all brighter than magnitude 18.5. Stars brighter than 11.5 are "saturated" (all look the same brightness in the image).

Planets, including those like our own Earth, form from epic collisions between asteroids and even bigger bodies, called proto-planets. Sometimes the colliding bodies are ground to dust, and sometim...