After nearly a decade of groundbreaking exploration, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope concluded its mission, leaving a lasting ...

NASA is marking two milestones in the search for planets like Earth: the successful completion of the Kepler Space Telescope’s 3.5-year prime mission and the beginning of an extended mission that ...

Natalie Batalha, a former project scientist for NASA’s Kepler Mission, will lead the audience on a journey to the stars, providing insight into future missions to search for lives beyond the Earth in ...

Scientists have long assumed that, like rocky planets such as Earth, sub-Neptunes begin with molten magma oceans. Their thick ...

A huge "super-Earth" with an extreme climate that results in it being habitable for only part of its orbit has been discovered orbiting a star 2,472 light years away. And the most remarkable thing is, ...

AMES, Iowa – An international team of astronomers has used nearly three years of high precision data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to make the first observations of a planet outside our solar system ...

Technicians working inside the Astrotech Space Operations facility near NASA's Kennedy Space Center look over the Kepler spacecraft soon after it arrived in Florida in preparation for launch. [Read ...

When the Kepler space telescope malfunctioned last spring, it looked as though its incredibly successful planet-hunting mission might be over—and NASA made that sad fact official a few months later.

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 ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A super-Earth basks in the glow of its star in this artist's impression. Is the world habitable ...