Alien Planets

Two new infrared mosaics of the Orion Nebula showcase the JWST's abilities while revealing new insights into this familiar star-forming region.

A new class of proteins found in methane deposits on Earth's seafloor could help inform the search for alien life.

Here's how your brain might adjust to see color on another world.

The findings also corroborate earlier reports that TRAPPIST-1b lacks a thick, hydrogen atmosphere.

The exoplanet K2-18b might host a water ocean.

Calculating the way three things orbit each other is notoriously tricky — but a new study may reveal 12,000 new ways to make it work.

The European Very Large Telescope in Chile has photographed a planet orbiting a star in a multi-star system that sits some 480 light-years from Earth.

As the search for "Planet Nine" in the outer solar system continues, new research suggests there may be an Earth twin buried deep within the frozen waste of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

The so-called Hycean planet K2–18 b is around twice the size of Earth and orbits in the habitable zone of a star located 120 light-years from our solar system.

Planning is well underway for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, a telescope project that will hunt for telltale signs of life in the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system.

A hot Jupiter exoplanet is blowing its top like a cartoon character throwing a tantrum, creating a tail of gas that is the largest planetary structure seen outside the solar system.

Astronomers using NASA's exoplanet-hunting TESS satellite have found a "warm" Jupiter with the longest period ever seen with an alien world.

Astronomers have unexpectedly discovered the heaviest Neptune-like planet yet — one four times more massive than our solar system's Neptune.

A rare temperature-sensitive molecule usually found in stars has been discovered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time, a marshmallow-like hot Jupiter called WASP-31b.

Astronomers have discovered a failed star that can't sustain nuclear fusion in its core, but is 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the sun.

Exoplanets in the habitable zone of the Trappist-1 star, some 40 light-years away from Earth, are more likely to have liquid water than researchers previously thought, according to a new study.

An incredible time-lapse video tracks the 17-year journey of a distant and massive exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, around its parent star between 2003 and 2020.

Cool stars with powerful magnetic fields could have remarkably fast stellar winds that strip away their planets' atmospheres, making even "habitable zone" worlds less friendly to life.

Rocky exoplanets could possess large amounts of water from the moment they form, observations by the James Webb Space Telescope suggest.

When NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope comes online, it could be capable of spotting as many as 400 Earth-size rogue planets, and that might merely be the tip of the iceberg.