Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Some 'water worlds' like Jupiter's moon Europa could potentially be habitable for life. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute The search ...

An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how planets form. Across our galaxy, astronomers routinely observe a ...

Astrobiologists disagree about whether advanced life is common or rare in our universe. But new research suggests that one thing is pretty certain – if an Earthlike world with significant water is ...

Astronomers have, for the first time, pinned down both the mass and distance of a planet that drifts through the galaxy without a parent star, turning a once purely theoretical class of worlds into a ...

An international research team has discovered a new planet so young that it has yet to emerge from the womb of matter where it is forming. This is the youngest protoplanet discovered to date. It's ...

More than 10 years after the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, astronomers have now discovered more than 250 of these planets. Until a few years ago, most of the newly discovered exoplanets ...

Mysteries of one of the most fascinating nearby planetary systems now have been solved. The study, which presents the first viable model for the planetary system orbiting one of the first stars ...

Over the past several years, astronomers have discovered a number of planets within so-called circumbinary systems, including Kepler-34(AB)b — a planet reminiscent of Star Wars’ Tatooine. Now, using ...

(THE CONVERSATION) The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this ...