Alien Planets

The planets around a star called TOI-178 know how to keep a beat — so smoothly, in fact, that scientists were able to discover new alien worlds by deciphering the system's music.

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

Scientists were able to measure the orbit of exoplanet GOT 'EM-1b, a gas giant nearly 1,300 light-years from Earth.

A rocky exoplanet known as TOI-561b was found circling one of the oldest stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The exoplanet is about 50% larger than Earth.

Astronomers just confirmed the existence of KOI-5Ab, which was first flagged as a potential planet by NASA's pioneering Kepler space telescope way back in 2009.

Scientists may have detected radio emissions from a planet orbiting a star beyond our sun for the first time.

Planet Nine may not be such an oddball after all, if it does indeed exist.

Scientists have discovered a cold, faint "super-planet" that has remained elusive to traditional infrared survey methods.

Scientists think they have identified a lava world so dramatic that it might boast a thin regional atmosphere of vaporized rock where it is closest to its star.

On average, each sunlike star in the Milky Way likely harbors between 0.4 and 0.9 rocky planets in its "habitable zone," researchers have found.

Astronomers have spotted the smallest "rogue planet" candidate yet known, a Mars- to Earth-mass world that apparently cruises through our Milky Way galaxy unattached to a star.

As humanity ramps up its search for alien life, we should keep in mind that E.T. might be hunting for us as well.

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."