NASA researchers explore a hybrid observatory using a space-based starshade and ground telescopes to improve direct imaging and detect hidden Earth-like exoplanets.

Since astronomers found the first planets outside our solar system in 1992 and the first planet around a sunlike star in 1995, scientists have sought the telltale glimmers, flickers and wobbles that ...

Exoplanets are planets outside Earth's solar system. In 1995, a gas giant named 51 Pegasi b, which orbits a star similar to Earth's sun, etched its name in history as the first exoplanet ever ...

Worlds upon worlds await us in the cosmos and we’re finding more all the time. Before 1992, we weren’t even completely certain planets existed outside of our solar system. Now, astronomers are finding ...

My Favorite Lecture Series 2026 is hosting Signals in a Sea of Stars: Finding Exoplanets from 4–5:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 10, in Wallace Hall on the ...

A rocky exoplanet outside the Earth's solar system may have an atmosphere, according to new evidence gathered by NASA researchers. The exoplanet, known as super-Earth TOI-561b, was discovered in 2020, ...

The team of astronomers behind the find suggested it could help us better understand planet and moon formation in our solar system and beyond the Milky Way. The team was able to make the first-ever ...

Image of the disk around the star TWA 7 recorded using ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s SPHERE instrument. The image captured with JWST’s MIRI instrument is overlayed. We can clearly see the empty area ...

To capture an image of the exoplanet without the star, the new coronagraph design uses a mode sorter to isolate and eliminate light from the star and an inverse mode sorter to recompose the optical ...

An illustration of what it might look like to visit Kepler 16 b, a nearby exoplanet with twin suns. Credit: NASA Imagine a planet where molten diamond rains from the sky, hurled sideways by winds that ...