A newly identified world beyond our solar system is giving scientists a fresh look at how strange planets can be, and it may come with a stench to match. Astronomers have discovered what appears to be ...

A hazy, ultra-light “super-puff” planet, Kepler-51d, is hiding its secrets and challenging how scientists understand planet formation.

A new study challenges the traditional boundaries of the habitable zone, showing that liquid water could exist on the dark sides of tidally locked planets or beneath thick ice on distant worlds. For ...

Life as we know it needs liquid water. For liquid water to exist on a given planet, it has to lie in a specific region called the “habitable zone” or “Goldilocks zone”. This zone is estimated using ...

The traditional habitable zone is shown by the diagonal orange stripe. Its distance from the host star (horizontal axis, in Astronomical Units) increases with luminosity, which increases with the mass ...

In our solar system, Jupiter is the undisputed king. If you added more mass to Jupiter, it wouldn’t actually get much bigger ...

In this video Dr Hannah and I go through every planet featured in Star Trek The Next Generation to establish which ones could really exist. Fortunately for us the vast, vast majority of the planets ...

Life on Earth may exist thanks to an incredible stroke of luck — a chemical sweet spot that most planets miss during their formation but ours managed to hit. A new study shows that Earth formed under ...

For many years, astronomers have been looking for extraterrestrial life. In doing so, astronomers have narrowed their search to a small “habitable zone” around stars. This habitable zone defines the ...

Rogue moons drifting through space may host long-lived oceans for up to 4.3 billion years, expanding where scientists search ...

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 ...