Terrestrial Exoplanets

News & Articles

Webb Study Reveals Rocky Planets Can Form in Extreme Environments

6 min read

An international team of astronomers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to provide the first observation of water and…

Article5 months ago
The disk of a bright reddish-orange-white star is just above and to the right of image center. A small black world is passing in front of the star. A closer planet is in the lower-left corner. We see it as an illuminated crescent facing the star. Two reddish-orange stars are off to the right of the central star. All on a black background dotted with more distant stars.

NASA’s Hubble Measures the Size of the Nearest Transiting Earth-Sized Planet

3 min read

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has measured the size of the nearest Earth-sized exoplanet that passes across the face of a…

Article5 months ago
Where the Sun Sets Twice (Artist Concept)

Strange New Worlds

1 min read

A world with two suns, a lava planet, and a world trapped in eternal darkness are just some of the…

Topic
Illustration shows Earth's Sun swollen into its red-giant phase billions of years from now. The Sun itself is a fiery red orange, and four planets – our solar system's inner planets – can be seen as crescents being consumed by the swollen Sun, their atmospheres beginning to be blown away into diffuse trails behind them.

Finding Life Beyond Earth: What Comes Next?

6 min read

The final story in our series considers the future of the search for life beyond Earth – and whether we…

Article9 months ago
As if in orbit, we see in this illustration the limb of a distant planet, dark as if on the night-side, in the foreground, with blobs and streams of artificial light on the surface. In the middle of the image, with the planet below, is the planet’s star – its sun – just at the edge of the planet, which stretches on a curve all the way across the image. Above the planet and star is the dark of space.

Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: Technosignatures

8 min read

Signs of life beyond Earth could take forms that are clearly artificial – radio or light signals, or even evidence…

Article10 months ago
View from above shows early Earth as it might have looked when life first formed. Dusky colors include a dull green and tan foreground with rocks, a river and small vernal ponds glinting in the sunlight. Above the horizon is a gray-blue sky with long, slanting clouds of yellow-tan.

‘Life’ in the Lab

10 min read

Just how life started billions of years ago on Earth, and how it might start on other worlds, are the…

Article10 months ago
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