After three years of searching, scientists have caught the elusive phenomenon. — -- The "brilliant flash" that occurs when a star dies and explodes has been captured for the first time in visible ...

Space-watchers saw the handwriting on the wall months ago, but now it’s official: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, by far the most successful planet-hunting telescope in history, isn’t coming back. Engineers ...

Relative sizes of the newly discovered habitable-zone planets and Earth. Left to right: Kepler-69c, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f and Earth (except for Earth, these are artists' renditions). Image credit: ...

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope confirmed more than 2,600 exoplanets, including several located in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water could exist. Worlds like Kepler-186f, Kepler-452b, and ...

Although astronomers have directly imaged a few dozen gas giants on the scale of Jupiter, Earth-sized planets are too small and dim to be directly imaged. That's not to say there's a shortage of Earth ...

A new investigation into old Kepler data has revealed that a planetary system once thought to house zero planets actually has two planets that orbit their star in a unique style, like an old-fashioned ...

An artistic concept of Kepler-452b, Earth's Bigger, Older Cousin.NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle It’s not easy being Earth. In order to become the vibrant ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An eighth planet has been found in a faraway solar system, matching our own in numbers. Even more amazing, machines and not humans made the discovery. NASA joined with Google ...

Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using observations from NASA missions of orbiting planets crossing their stars’ faces. The model builds on a ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that ...