The super-Earth exoplanet 55 Cancri e, depicted with its star in this artist's concept, likely has an atmosphere thicker than Earth's but with ingredients that could be similar to those of Earth's atmosphere.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Twice as big as Earth, the...
Some of the coldest and darkest dust in space shines brightly in this infrared image from the Herschel Observatory.
Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech
Life on our planet might have originated from biological particles brought to Earth in streams of space dust, a study...
Image of starlight on exoplanet.
Credit: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Is there life beyond Earth in the cosmos? Astronomers looking for signs have found that our Milky Way galaxy teems with exoplanets, some with conditions that could be right for extraterrestrial life....
This artist's impression shows the temperate planet Ross 128 b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background. This planet, which lies only 11 light-years from Earth, was found by a team using ESO's unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument....
This image is a view of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, with its ringed host in the background. New research from the University of Washington may solve a riddle of the direction of sand dunes on the moon's surface.
Credit: Antoine...
The Van Allen Belts, shown in green in this illustration, are concentric doughnut-shaped belts filled with charged particles, trapped by Earth's magnetic field.
Credit: Tony Phillips/NASA
Scientists have long known that solar-energized particles trapped around the planet are sometimes scattered into...
Pluto's haze layer is blue in this image taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera and computer generated to replicate true color. Haze is produced by sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to small particles...
An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars.
Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL
The recent detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) came from two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun,...
The Perseus galaxy cluster, located about 240 million light-years away, is shown in this composite of visible light (green and red) and near-infrared images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Unseen here is a thin, hot, X-ray-emitting gas that...
Planet Earth, photographed Dec. 7, 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission.
Credit: NASA
Human well-being will be severely jeopardized by negative trends in some types of environmental harm, such as a changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species...
Spiral structure emerges in Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) simulation, which modeled stellar feedback on galaxy formation.
Credit: Image courtesy of University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
An interstellar mystery of why stars form has been solved thanks...
