Scientists have discovered thousands of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, aka exoplanets. Most of those planets have boring names consisting of letters and numbers that keep track of the star catalogue in which they are listed. Take, for example, planet HD 136418b. The "HD" refers to the Henry Draper Catalogue, the "136418" means the planet orbits the 136,418th star in the catalogue, and the "b" refers to it being the first planet discovered around that star (they don't use "a" because

The first exosolar planet (a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun) was discovered in 1995, and since then humans have found over 3600 planets outside of our solar system. Some of those found are orbiting not one star like we do, but two stars. For example, stars Kepler-35A and 35B orbit each other, but a planet Kepler-35b, orbits both of them. This is much more like the fantasy word Tatooine in the space epic Star Wars than our own planet Earth. In A New Hope, we see young Luke Skywalker

A full re-examination of the Kepler Space Telescope's data has revealed an additional 10 new planets that are near-Earth size and in their host-star's habitable zone. Even more interesting, follow-up studies on all of the rocky planets discovered by Kepler (thousands) to-date show that smaller planets come in two sizes. They are either 1.5 Earth Radii and smaller, or 2 Earth Radii and larger. The Kepler Space Telescope held its primary data collection from 2009 to 2013. The total number of

When you read a scientific story in a popular blog or magazine, many times you will see the caveat "artist interpretation" next to some of the accompanying images. This as a gross undersell of the time, effort, and most important, accuracy, that goes into developing the renders. While we don't know what a black hole or an exoplanet looks like, it is important to attempt to visualize them, and to do it as accurately as possible. This video is an interview with two people who are responsible for

A newly discovered exoplanet, LHS 1140b, is being called the "best place to look for signs of life beyond the Solar System." The reason is because of a confluence of factors: the planet is likely rocky, orbits a relatively quiet star, passes in-front of its star from Earth's point-of-view every 25 days, and likely has an atmosphere. At the moment, studying that atmosphere in detail is not possible; however, with the next generation of telescopes coming online in the coming years (TMT, ELT, JWST)

What's the closest star to Earth? Answer: Proxima Centauri, one of three stars in the Alpha Centauri star system. Proxima Centauri is a small M-dwarf star, meaning it is red in colour, and has a relatively cool stellar temperature of about 3000°K. While small, weighing in at 12% the mass of the Sun, M-dwarf stars are the most common star type in the Universe. In 2016, an international group of researchers discovered a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri that is about 1.5x larger than Earth: the

Astronomers from Keele University, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and others, have discovered the first atmosphere around an Earth-sized planet. The planet, GJ1132b is about 1.4x Earth's diameter and 39 light years away from us. Currently there are over 3000 known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, but only a handful of which have been confirmed to have atmospheres, and all of which are massive Jupiter-sized planets. In the ongoing quest to find a planet similar to Earth, this