Scientists have discovered more than 4,000 alien planets since spotting the first ones orbiting a star beyond our sun back in 1992. Here's a brief rundown of the main techniques they use to find these ...

Due to their relative faintness compared to their parent stars, most known exoplanets have been discovered using indirect detection methods – that is, detecting the effects they have rather than ...

With an assist from the NEID spectrograph, a team of astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanet Gaia-4b—one of the most massive planets known to orbit a low-mass star. Gaia-4b is also the ...

Astronomers have discovered one of the lightest planets ever found and it's orbiting the star right next door to our own, just over four light-years away from Earth. Confirmation of Proxima d is ...

The first exoplanet discovery in 1995 around a Sun-like star challenged the then-prevailing model of planetary system formation based solely on our solar system, revealing the existence of massive ...

As the first successful technique used to detect exoplanets orbiting distant stars, the radial velocity method aims to detect a periodic Doppler shift in a stellar spectrum due to the star's motion ...

Astronomers have used a new technique to confirm a real-life Tatooine, the fictional planet with two suns that was home to Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.” The planet, Kepler-16b, is about 245 light ...

There are literally sextillions of stars peppered throughout the universe. Our galaxy alone contains at least 400 billion of them, yet, for a significant portion of our history, we weren’t sure if our ...

With few unexplored regions left on Earth for those with the itch for exploration, planets around other stars are the new terra incognita. Beyond the inimitable coolness of outer space, exoplanets ...

The exoplanet Proxima b, as shown in this artist's illustration, is thought to be inhospitable to life due to the atmosphere-stripping behavior of its star. It should be an 'eyeball' world, where one ...