Three astronomers have found a new ring around the planet Saturn and it's said to be the largest of Saturn's rings. According to scientists, the ring is so large, if we could look up and see it, it would occupy a place in the sky four times the size of the full moon. The very faint ring stretches out miles and miles into space.

The longest set of HARPS measurements ever made has firmly established the nature of the smallest and fastest-orbiting exoplanet known, CoRoT-7b, revealing its mass as five times that of Earth's.

A team of researchers from the CSIC-INTA Astrobiology Centre in Madrid has confirmed that the type of mineralogical composition on the surface of Mars influences the measuring of its temperature. The study is published this week in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring and will be used to interpret the data from the soil temperature sensor of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) vehicle, whose launch is envisaged for 2011.

Venus Express has charted the first map of Venus's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The new map hints that our neighbouring world may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water.

Mars gets as far as 250 million miles away, but many parts of it closely resemble places on Earth, including its landscape, history of water, soil and even its weather, says a Texas A&M University researcher in the current issue of "Science" magazine.

ell-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, “e”, in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist.

Kepler is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Kepler will search the Milky Way galaxy for habitable life. "There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy," said Alan Boss to CNN, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of a new book.

A spectacular new image of an unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma Galaxy Cluster has been created from data taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It reveals fine details of the galaxy, NGC 4921, as well as an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early Universe.

The Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of France has announced that the smallest earth like planet was discovered on February 3, 2009 by the French telescope COROT. The earth like planet is the smallest exoplanet yet, with a surface to walk on.

COROT has found the smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the Solar System. The amazing planet is less than twice the size of Earth and orbits a Sun-like star. Its temperature is so high that it is possibly covered in lava or water vapour.

Here on Earth we worry about our planet's atmosphere warming by a few degrees on average over the next century, and even weather fronts bring temporary changes in temperature of no more than tens of degrees.

A team of NASA and university scientists has achieved the first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars. This discovery indicates the planet is either biologically or geologically active.