How many planets do you think are in this photo? At least hundreds of thousands according to a new joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way in 2006-2007 looking for ...

IMAGE: An artist’s impression of a free-floating planet. Using observations and archival data from several of NSF’s NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world ...

PoET and ESPRESSO telescopes are new tools that will eliminate stellar noise and detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like ...

Using observations and archival data from several of NSF’s NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have discovered at least 70 ...

Astronomers at the University of Auckland claim that there are actually around 100 billion habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. There are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the universe, ...

Building on eight years of extraordinary discoveries by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS and SDSS-II), a new program of four coordinated surveys will revolutionize the study of the distant universe, ...

The most common stars in the Milky Way may be even less friendly to life than previously suspected. New research suggests that red dwarf stars, stellar bodies smaller and less massive than the sun, ...

The Milky Way keeps its planets close to its chest. Stars in a thin, flat disk bisecting the galaxy have more planets on average than stars in a thicker, enveloping disk — and astronomers now think ...

Tiny crystals in Earth’s crust may have recorded meteorite and comet impacts as our planet traveled through the spiral arms ...

NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread ...