Planet hunters unveil the tricks of the trade for finding planets around nearby stars and scanning them for signs of life. Are we alone? It's the biggest question ever. And the answer is almost within reach. With so many galaxies, and each with so many stars, how could the Earth be unique? From E...

Check out this animation from the Kepler space telescope portraying a dramatic planetary discovery. Kepler-10b, it's called, orbits its sun at a distance more than 20 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun. The daytime temperature is more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Intense radiation from th...

This ESOCast briefly describes the planetary mother lode detected around the red dwarf star Gliese 581. This star may be tiny, but it could harbor something big.

From NASA's James Webb Telescope, feast on this gorgeous, ground-breaking visualization that explores how stars form in dense dusty regions of our galaxy such as the Eagle nebula. With its huge mirror, the James the Webb Space Telescope will be able to see inside these dense clouds of gas and dust.

Find out where to look for Extraterrestrial Life. What planets are likely to have the right conditions? And what makes Earth special? So far, in this age of planet hunting, we've yet to find anything like our solar system... with rocky inner planets in neat circular orbits, and evenly spaced gas ...

An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests. A new analysis of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a "zombi...

The rich planet discoveries around the red dwarf star, Gliese 581, within the neighborhood of the sun.

Astronomers now know that planets around other stars are plentiful. But they do not fully understand how they form and there are many aspects of the formation of comets, planets and other rocky bodies that remain a mystery. However, new observations exploiting the power of the ALMA telescope arra...

A new type of exoplanet finder comes on line in the next year. Working with the giant telescopes of the Chilean outback, the Very Large Telescope on Mt Paranal, it will distinguish the polarized light of planet atmospheres from the light of their parent stars. This new planet detection system off...

A Super Earth is a planet smaller than Neptune, but larger than Earth. There are no Super Earths in our solar system. But they may be the most common type of planet in our galaxy, according to data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Some have rock or ice cores wrapped in hydrogen and helium gas. Ot...