Alien Planets

These are the top space stories this week from Space.com.

Two dozen alien worlds may be as good as or better than Earth for life as we know it, a new study finds.

Europe's new telescope studying alien planets has created its first detailed portrait of a world, and it's a weird one: hot and tilted around a warped star.

NASA just launched a citizen-science project called Planet Patrol, which asks volunteers around the world to sort through images collected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Scientists have found an alien world that orbits its host star every 3.14 Earth days, a close approximation of the famous mathematical constant pi.

Astronomers have discovered a new type of alien world — the first known "ultra-hot Neptune," a giant planet that orbits its star 60 times closer than Earth does the sun, a new study finds.

MIT astronomer Sara Seager has a quest: to find a second Earth. That scientific quest has developed and persisted against the backdrop of a personal life full of adventure, love and heartbreak.

Science, even science about the heavens, is done by people, astronomer Sara Seager reminds us throughout her new memoir, "The Smallest Lights in the Universe."

Astronomers have spotted signs of an intact giant planet circling a superdense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, a new study reports.

Some far-off alien planets could be made of diamonds, scientists say in a new study.

TESS wrapped up its two-year primary mission on July 4, having discovered 66 confirmed alien planets and nearly 2,100 "candidates" that scientists still need to vet.

Scientists may one day detect alien planets outside the Milky Way using the ripples in space and time known as gravitational waves, a new study finds.

Tens of thousands of planets like Earth and Neptune might orbit the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

A new NASA space observatory could push planet-hunting forward at warp speed by gathering data up to 500 times faster than the venerable Hubble Space Telescope does.

New 3D supercomputer simulations show the early stages of planetary collisions, demonstrating what may happen to an Earth-like planet struck by a giant object.

A strong greenhouse effect allows these "super-Earth" exoplanets to masquerade as "mini-Neptunes."

For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sunlike star.

Citizen scientists recently helped direct astronomers to a pair of objects that straddle the line between planets and stars.

Rocky planets that formed early in our Milky Way galaxy's 13.2-billion-year history have a better chance of supporting life than worlds that were later to the party, a new study suggests.