NASA’s orbiting Kepler telescope has discovered an unlikely pair of planets orbiting a distant star. One is small and rocky, the other is large and gaseous. What makes them unusual is that both are ...

SEATTLE —NASA has discovered the smallest planet ever seen beyond our solar system — a rocky world just 1.4 times larger than Earth — using its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The planet, ...

But the Kepler-9 planets have orbits that are significantly closer to their parent star than Mercury is to our own sun. Astronomers assume that the planets formed farther out, in a colder region where ...

NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

For most of his career, Geoff Marcy never thought he'd find any extrasolar planets. But that's all changed. Marcy is one of the lead astronomers sifting through the Kepler data, and has been credited ...

NASA has discovered a new super-Earth that has a year only lasting a few hours. The exoplanet K2-141b, was found very close to its orange sun-like star, and has an orbital period of less than one ...

Scientists have made an exciting discovery in deep space — but not with an existing telescope or space probe. Combing through a backlog of data collected several years ago by NASA’s now defunct Kepler ...

Kepler’s goodnight message had to be timed perfectly. On Thursday 15 November, a series of commands from a laboratory in Colorado were transmitted to Nasa’s Deep Space Network, a system of huge radio ...

This chart, from around 1660, shows the signs of the zodiac and a model of the solar system with Earth at the centre. For decades or even centuries after Kepler clearly demonstrated that not only is ...

Thirty years ago this week, two Swiss astronomers announced that they had spotted the first known planet orbiting a Sun-like star. The Nobel-winning discovery, later published in the pages of Nature, ...