Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 29, 2012

It's Official! Water Ice Discovered on Mercury

It's time to add Mercury to the list of worlds where you can go ice-skating. Confirming decades of suspicion, a NASA spacecraft has spotted vast deposits of water ice on the planet closest to the sun. Temperatures on Mercury can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius), but around the...

Nov 30, 2012

Mercury's Water Ice Bodes Well for Alien Life Search

The discovery of huge amounts of water ice and possible organic compounds on the heat-blasted planet Mercury suggests that the raw materials necessary for life as we know it may be common throughout the solar system, researchers say. Mercury likely harbors between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons of...

Dec 12, 2016

Extinction-Level Superflares May Blast Earth's Nearest Exoplanet Proxima b

The recent discovery of a planet around the star closest to Earth's sun has raised hopes that life might exist around the sun's nearest neighbor, but researchers now find that this world might frequently experience extinction-level superflares from its star. In August, scientists revealed the existence of an alien world...

Apr 7, 2017

Discovery! Atmosphere Spotted on Nearly Earth-Size Exoplanet in First

For the first time, scientists have detected an atmosphere around a planet beyond our solar system that's just a little bit larger than Earth. The exoplanet GJ 1132b, which orbits the dwarf star GJ 1132, is located about 39 light-years away from Earth. It has a radius about 1.4 times...

Jun 19, 2017

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Finds Hundreds of New Exoplanets, Boosts Total to 4,034

This story was updated at 2:45 p.m. EDT. NASA has unveiled the complete set of data from the first four years of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope mission, which stared at a single patch of the sky in the search for alien planets. The result: Kepler has discovered 219 new...

Apr 16, 2018

SpaceX Rocket Launching NASA's TESS Exoplanet Hunter Today: Watch Live

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here today at 6:32 p.m. EDT (2232 GMT). Watch the launch live at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, beginning at 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT). The weather looks good for the launch, with...

Apr 18, 2018

Why This New Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope Blows Kepler Out of the Water

With just a 30-second window, NASA launched its next exoplanet-searching satellite today (April 18) toward a never-before-used orbit that was discovered in the 1990s. The goal? To get the ultimate view of the night sky from a perfect orbit around Earth. Once inside that perfect orbit — it should take...

May 16, 2018

What's Next for Exoplanet Searches? Live Science Talks with Astrophysicist Sara Seager

Live Science caught up with Seager this month here at the 2018 Liberty Science Center Genius Gala where she was an honoree. Here's the scoop from Seager on where we're at in this Earth-like planet search and how the heck we'll know when we've found one with the ingredients for...

Sep 12, 2018

The Closest Exoplanet to Earth Could Be 'Highly Habitable'

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet — known as Proxima Centauri b— in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models...

Oct 20, 2018

Exoplanet Hunters Have a New Plan to Spot Hidden 'Migrating' Worlds

There's a telescope that can see thick rings of dust in distant star systems. These rings are huge — wide enough in some cases to encircle most or all the planets in our solar system. And they're the birthplaces of exoplanets. Understanding how they work could teach us about how...

Nov 14, 2018

Scientists Are '99 Percent' Sure There's a Huge Exoplanet Very Close to Our Solar System

Sitting about 6 light-years away from our sun, the red dwarf named Barnard's star is the nearest solitary star to our solar system and the fastest-moving star in our night sky. It's also really wobbly. Chalk up the wobbles to old age if you like: The star may have been...

Jan 18, 2019

Here's How a Huge Exoplanet Very Close to Earth Could Hide Strange Forms of Life

There's a rocky planet out there that's very big and cold. Its sun, a red dwarf named Barnard's star looks much larger in its sky than Earth's. It bathes the planet in X-rays and ultraviolet light, likely enough radiation to strip away any atmosphere. But Barnard's star is also much...

Feb 11, 2013

See Elusive Mercury as 'Pink' Planet in Sunset Sky

Mercury, the speedy little planet closest to the sun, is making a special twilight appearance this month as a bright pink dot low in the sky. The show started on Feb. 8 and will continue until Feb. 21. If the sky is clear, Mercury should emerge about a half hour...

Feb 23, 2013

Colorful Map of Mercury Snapped by NASA Spacecraft (Video)

A new video by a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mercury is showing the closest planet to the sun like never before, revealing the rocky world as an oddly colorful planet. Scientists created the new video of Mercury from space using images captured by NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which has been studying the...

Mar 6, 2013

NASA Spacecraft Makes 1st Complete Map of Planet Mercury

The surface of the planet Mercury has been completely mapped for the first time in history, scientists say. The closest planet to the sun hasn't received as much scientific attention as some of its more flashy solar system neighbors, such as Mars, but NASA's Messenger spacecraft is helping to close...