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We're entering the era of the 'super-Earths,' when rocky planets larger than our own will pepper the lists of new discoveries. These smaller worlds will occasionally make a transit of their star, as does CoRoT-7b, and that's when things really get interesting. After...

Recent work from the Lick-Carnegie team has found that the M-dwarf HIP 57050 is orbited by a Saturn-mass world with an orbital period of 41.4 days. What catches the eye about this exoplanet is its temperature, some 230 kelvin or -43 degrees Celsius, warm enough to...

What a welcome event the release of James Cameron's new film Avatar must be for scientists working on the question of exomoons -- satellites orbiting extrasolar planets. Imagine being a Lisa Kaltenegger (CfA) or David Kipping (University College London), hard at work...

While we've looked several times in these pages at David Kipping's work on exomoons, the investigation of moons much closer to home reminds us that finding a habitable satellite of another planet may not be out of our reach. After all, we're gaining insights into...

After we've found an Earth-like planet with a potential for life, what further things can we do to investigate it? A team led by Jean Schneider (Paris Observatory) asks this question in a new paper, speculating that there are things a technological society does that...

The hunt for exomoons -- satellites of planets around other stars -- gets more interesting all the time. This morning I received a note from David Kipping (University College London), who has been studying methods for finding such objects. Kipping and colleagues have...

We now have on the order of 335 confirmed exoplanets, with an ongoing race between the CoRoT and Kepler teams to find the first Earth analog in the habitable zone around another star. CoRoT's shorter observation cycles make finding a terrestrial world around a G-class...

When you have assets in space, the thing to do is redeploy them as needed. That creates what's called an 'extended mission,' and the latest spacecraft to get one is Deep Impact, the vehicle whose impactor made such a splash when it was driven into comet Tempel 1 in...

We're learning more and more about HD 189733b, an extrasolar planet some 63 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vulpecula. This transiting 'hot Jupiter' orbits once every two days about three million miles out from its primary. David...

We have interesting exoplanetary news coming up in tomorrow's post, but until then let's talk about Pluto, and the latest Hubble findings about this intriguing system. The two recently found moons are now seen via Hubble imagery to have the same color as Charon,...