Earth (the little dot in the upper right), as seen in scattered yellow sunlight from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers, by the Voyager 1 probe as it… Read the rest of the article: Goodbye, and hello

Voyager 1, our civilization's furthest and fastest emissary into space. Traveling at 17 kilometers per second, Voyager 1 still would take some 73,000 years to reach the nearest star. Yesterday,… Read the rest of the article: Incredible journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank?

One reason I like writing about space science is because it offers so many gorgeous, mind-blowing images. Each and every day, they pulse from observatories that dot the Earth, and… Read the rest of the article: Where stars are born …

Alpha Centauri, the Sun's nearest neighboring star system, seen by the Cassini orbiter above the limb of Saturn. / NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Sometimes I worry that the popularity of cosmology—the… Read the rest of the article: 5 Stars worth watching

An artist's rendition of a habitable moon orbiting a gas-giant planet. / David A. Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Nevermind the Ewoks. For astrobiologists, the best part of Return of… Read the rest of the article: Stranger than fiction: The search for habitable exomoons

Note from Lee: Video is best viewed in HD, full-screen mode. Following up on yesterday's post about Dan Fabrycky's festive rendition of Kepler's candidate multi-planet systems, I'm proud to unveil… Read the rest of the article: A new view of the galaxy: Exclusive Kepler data visualization by Jer Thorp

Last week's data release from Kepler appears to have temporarily overwhelmed both professional and amateur exoplanet enthusiasts. After the initial flurry of basic overview posts on the Kepler data, I… Read the rest of the article: Exploring Kepler's library

A tale of two planets: What's "Earth-like" mean? by Lee Billings In early 2005, a sophisticated metal-and-plastic package known as the Huygens Probe entered the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest… Read the rest of the article: A tale of two planets: What's "Earth-like" mean?

Hot on the heels of my earlier conversation with Greg Laughlin about his valuation formula for Kepler's exoplanets, Laughlin crunched the numbers for Kepler's new list of 50 candidates orbiting… Read the rest of the article: KOI 326.01: The cream of the new Kepler crop

A hazy view of a $5 quadrillion binary-planet system, the Earth and the Moon, as seen from Mars, a $14,000 world. Taken by Mars Global Surveyor on May 8th, 2003… Read the rest of the article: Cosmic Commodities: How much is a new planet worth?

An artist's rendition of Kepler-11, a newly announced system of 6 confirmed transiting exoplanets that will be a laboratory for planet-formation theories for years to come. If these 6 worlds… Read the rest of the article: Kepler: All systems go!

I hadn't realized (until checked my news feed this morning) that today was Groundhog Day, the annual holiday celebrated in the United States and Canada where a chubby, furry rodent—a… Read the rest of the article: Science and press conferences: Seeing our own shadow

The 2004 transit of Venus across the Sun, as viewed by NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite. The faint red ring around Venus is a consequence of sunlight… Read the rest of the article: Six ways to find another Earth

This chart was assembled from data on the incomparable Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia , maintained and curated by the astronomer Jean Schneider. It depicts the 520 exoplanets detected between 1992 and… Read the rest of the article: Missing: Thousands of planets

"Science—knowledge—only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." That's one of the first comments the late,… Read the rest of the article: Is There Life Out There?—The Most Thrilling Question We Can Answer