Updated models suggest only 60,000 to 250,000 Earth-like habitats may exist in the Galaxy, with far fewer capable of ...

How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my ...

Does a planet just have to be in a star’s habitable zone to be habitable, or are other forces at play? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of ...

The moon’s surface has long been considered barren, but new research published in Communications Earth & Environment suggests ...

Artist’s impression of Earth in the early Archean with a purplish hydrosphere and coastal regions. Even in this early period, life flourished and was gaining complexity. Credit: Oleg Kuznetsov ...

NASA’s Carruthers mission will film Earth’s elusive exosphere to understand space weather, atmospheric escape, and planetary habitability. A NASA mission aims to photograph a feature of Earth that is ...

Hydrogen and helium atmospheres could keep exoplanets warm enough to be habitable for billions of years, even at huge distances from their stars. Astrobiologists normally think of the habitable zone ...

Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era. Though traditionally viewed through the lens of our home planet and its evolutionary history, data ...

Earth should have lost its water long before life ever had a chance to appear. Bathed in a young Sun’s fierce radiation and wrapped in a global magma ocean, the planet’s surface looked more like a ...

Strange ‘eggshell planets’ are among the rich variety of exoplanets possible, according to a study from Washington University in St. Louis. These rocky worlds have an ultra-thin outer brittle layer ...

The discovery of the first exoplanet, PSR B1257+12, in 1992, followed by 51 Pegasi b in 1995 orbiting a sun-like star, inaugurated an era of prolific planetary findings, now totaling over 5,500 ...