The search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond should include efforts to detect what scientists sometimes refer to as "weird" life -- that is, life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth - says a new report from the National Research Council.

Christopher T. Russell, UCLA professor of geophysics and space physics, has spent 15 years working on NASA’s Dawn mission to the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. As the scheduled July 7 launch from Cape Canaveral nears, Russell is ready, and so is Dawn.

The world is abuzz with the discovery of an extrasolar, Earth-like planet around the star Gliese 581 that is relatively close to our Earth at 20 light years away in the constellation Libra.

University of Michigan astronomers combined light from four widely separated telescopes to produce the first picture showing surface details on a sun-like star beyond our solar system.

The world's largest and most prolific team of planet hunters announced today (Monday, May 28) the discovery of 28 new planets outside our solar system, increasing to 236 the total number of known exoplanets.

Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun storm season is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

Supersonic winds more than six times faster than those on Jupiter are blasting through the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet 60 light years away, say scientists who've analyzed results from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has provided new data on the Jupiter system, stunning scientists with never-before-seen perspectives of the giant planet's atmosphere, rings, moons and magnetosphere.

An international solar weather monitoring project launched by NASA last year which involves Sydney University Physicists has produced the first three dimensional images of our Sun.

Earth sits between two worlds that have been devastated by climate catastrophes. In the effort to combat global warming, our neighbours can provide valuable insights into the way climate catastrophes affect planets.

Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, an exoplanet with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and capable of having liquid water. Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered a super-Earth about 5 times the mass of the Earth that orbits a red dwarf, already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet.

One year has passed since 11 April 2006, when Venus Express, Europe's first mission to Venus and the only spacecraft now in orbit around the planet, reached its destination. Since then, this advanced probe, born to explore one of the most mysterious planetary bodies in the Solar System, has been revealing planetary details never caught before.