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Exoplanet Research
1hr 33mins
"Many astronomers are really driven by the search for Earth twins because I think deep down the natural endpoint of this whole goal of looking for planets is to answer the question, are we alone?"
Even from a single pixel, multiwavelength data taken over time can reveal clouds, icecaps, oceans, continents, and even signs of life.
Barnard's star, the closest singlet star system to ours, has long been a target for planet-hunters. We've finally confirmed it: they exist!
At extremely close distances to their stars, even rocky planets can be completely disintegrated. We've just caught our first one in action.
Here in our Solar System, terrestrial bodies get moons from gravitational capture or collisions. The Pluto-Charon system? It was both.
A young, nearby, massive star, whose protoplanetary disk appears perfectly edge-on, was just viewed by JWST, with staggering implications.
A new SETI study shows how far the field of technosignatures has come.
Seeking life beyond the Solar System, we first look to the closest star systems with Earth-like planets. Here's why that's not good enough.
Since mid-2022, JWST has been showing us how the Universe grows up, from planets to galaxies and more. So, what's its biggest find of all?
Earth is actively broadcasting and actively searching for intelligent civilizations. But could our technology even detect ourselves?
Known as orphaned planets, rogue planets, or planets without parent stars, these "outliers" might be the most common type of planet overall.
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
The 5th brightest star in our night sky is young, blue, and apparently devoid of massive planets. New JWST observations deepen the mystery.
Could life be widespread throughout the cosmos, in the subsurface oceans of ice-covered worlds? NASA's Europa Clipper mission investigates.
Just 460 light-years away, the closest newborn protostars are forming in the Taurus molecular cloud. Here are JWST's astonishing insights.
Finding life beyond our Solar System requires understanding its host planet.
The structure of our Solar System has been known for centuries. When we finally started finding exoplanets, they surprised everyone.
Newborn stars are surrounded only by a featureless disk. Debris disks persist for hundreds of millions of years. So when do planets form?
In 2023, data from the James Webb Space Telescope soured hopes that TRAPPIST-1 c had an atmosphere. That disappointment might have been premature.
The number of planets that could support life may be far greater than previously thought, a recent discovery suggests.
An interview with Lisa Kaltenegger, the founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute, about the modern quest to answer an age-old question: "Are we alone in the cosmos?"
"I hope we take a mindset where we are willing to look for weird life in weird places."
Life arose on Earth very early on. After a few billion years, here we are: intelligent and technologically advanced. Where's everyone else?
Explore how the study of exoplanets is transforming our understanding of ocean formation.
The detection of two celestial interlopers careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.
There are plenty of life-friendly stellar systems in the Universe today. But at some point in the far future, life's final extinction will occur.
As planets with too many volatiles and too little mass orbit their parent stars, their atmospheres photoevaporate, spelling doom for some.
Life became a possibility in the Universe as soon as the raw ingredients were present. But living, inhabited worlds required a bit more.
Fire was crucial to the evolution of human technology. That's why alien species stuck in the "oxygen bottleneck" may be forever primitive.
Planets can be Earth-like or Neptune-like, but only rarely are in between. This hot, Saturn-like planet hints at a solution to this puzzle.