Planets, Earth | featured news

Researchers find that 6% of red dwarf stars host habitable, Earth-sized planets - meaning the closest may be just 13 light-years away.

A pair of Earth-size worlds orbiting a dying star may be the fractured remnants of a single Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study says.

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. This is only the fifth time scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The small rock refugees were seen in a fireball in the sky six months ago, but they weren't discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.

The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth, scientists said on Monday. "We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.

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."...

A massive, long-ago extinction was once thought to have been caused by a destructive wave of volcanic activity. Scientists now point their fingers at another culprit. A giant, deadly “Earth burp.”

For the first time, Earth has a regular orbiting eye-in-the-sky spying on the solar system's smallest and strangest planet, Mercury.

Scientists said Tuesday they have found the best evidence yet of ice volcanoes on Saturn's giant moon Titan. Unlike volcanoes on Earth, such ...

The atmosphere of a relatively nearby extrasolar planet - just three times bigger than Earth - has been measured in a pioneering experiment.

Neptune may have polished off a super-Earth that once roamed the outer solar system and stolen its moon to boot. The brutal deed could explain mysterious heat radiating from the icy planet and the odd orbit of its moon Triton.