Planets, Astronomy | featured news

Scientists discover that Venus has an ozone layer high its its atmosphere, overturning the long-held view that it did not.

The Tatooine-like world about the size of Saturn is a frozen mass of rock and gas about 200 light years from Earth. NASA astronomers say it was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft launched in 2009. The desert planet of Tatooine is home to all manner of wonderful creatures — womp rats and banthas and jawas.

Astronomers on Monday announced the discovery of 50 new planets circling stars beyond the sun, including one “super-Earth” that is the right distance from its star to possibly have water. “If we are really, really lucky, this planet could be a habitat” like Earth, said Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

The first rock a NASA rover looked at when it arrived at a crater on Mars was unlike any looked at on the planet before, scientists said... And the first rock it looked at has already opened a new chapter in the study of Mars, NASA scientists said Thursday. On a telephone news conference, mission scientists giddily described that rock: full of zinc and bromine, elements that, at least for rocks on Earth, would be suggestive of geology formed with heat and water.

Researchers from the Geneva astronomical observatory have discovered a planet which they say is one of the best candidates for the ability to support life.

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

Clouds may make a world orbiting a nearby star suitable for life, reports an international astronomer team.

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday....

NASA is on the verge of launching a new solar-powered spacecraft all the way to Jupiter....

In a spectacle that might have beguiled poets, lovers and songwriters if only they had been around to see it, Earth once had two moons, astronomers now think. But the smaller one smashed into the other in what is being called the "big splat."...