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Researchers are racing to find the first planet that might support life as we know it.Gliese 876 is a modest star, just one-third the mass of our sun and only 15 light-years away, but it has a history-making planetary system all its own. In 1998 a team led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley detected the first sign of something interesting there: a giant planet, twice the mass of Jupiter, circling Gliese 876 once every two months, its gravity yanking the star back and forth at the speed of a jet plane. Three years later the...

HONOLULU — Astronomers have discovered 28 new planets outside of our solar system, increasing to 236 the number of known exoplanets, revealing that planets can exist around a broad spectrum of stellar types, from tiny, dim stars to giants.An artist's concept of the Neptune-sized planet GJ436b (right) orbiting the M-class dwarf star Gliese 436 at a distance of 3 million miles.

A bizarre world of scorching hot ice shrouded in a steamy atmosphere may have been found, according to new observations. Characterising the Neptune-size planet is an important milestone on the way to detecting and characterising Earth-like planets that could harbour life. Astronomers have discovered more than 200 planets orbiting other stars, called extrasolar planets or exoplanets. Almost all of these were detected by the way their gravity makes their parent stars wobble. But this technique, called the radial velocity method, reveals very little about the planet except for the size of its orbit and an estimate of its mass.

An observatory in southern Switzerland has detected the first planet made of ice. Located outside the solar system it is about the same size as Neptune. The find was made by a team of four astronomers from the St Luc observatory in canton Valais and Geneva University, with Lady Luck on their side... Using a 24-inch telescope, the team measured the light coming from a star 30 light years away, which is not very far in astronomical terms. Team members found it was dimmed a little for about an hour, meaning that this was the time when the planet was...