Starlight has been the key to finding thousands of exoplanets over the past decade, but researchers have found a new way to ...

Alien solar systems that are home to so-called "hot Jupiters" — gas giants circling sizzlingly close to their stars — are unlikely homes for Earth-like planets, researchers say. Hot Jupiters get their ...

When astronomers announced Kepler-452b, they were not just adding another distant world to a growing catalog. They were pointing to a planet that orbits a star much like our own, in a region where ...

It's one of the biggest unanswered questions in science: are there aliens out there, and if so, where are they hiding? Now, a discovery by NASA has raised the tantalising possibility that we're not ...

Planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system come in all shapes and sizes but mostly fit into a few categories: large and hot gas giants, super-Earths that are slightly larger than our planet, ...