Planet HD 85512b has best chance to harbor life

A team of U.S. astronomers has discovered a planet that is only a bit more massive than Earth, and they found it in the parent star's habitable zone, so it has the potential of harboring life. This is big news because the exoplanet is the first Earth-like planet found in the so-called Goldilocks Zone.  

Written by: William Atkins | Published in: SpaceA planet has been discovered circling Alpha Centauri B, a star that is about 4.3 light-years away from Earth. Other than our Sun, Alpha Centauri B, along with two companions, is a member of the closest star system to us. This discovery is exciting to astronomers, and adds to the hundreds of planets already found orbiting stars.

Astronomers are studying a planet called Corot-9b, which is about 1,500 light years from Earth, that they say will be studied in great detail because it is very similar to our planets in the Solar System. They think it might be reveal a "gold mine" of information.  

Discovering a big Hollywood star these days is easy to do, but astronomers have a more difficult time when they try to locate really big stars. However, astronomers recently succeeded at discovering the largest star in the Universe. Called R136a1, it is about 265 times more massive than our Sun.  

A survey of stars and planets performed by NASA astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has concluded that “Nearly one in four stars similar to the sun may host planets as small as Earth….”

For the first time, a team of astronomers has characterized a super-Earth planet using a ground-based telescope. This is important in our quest to find life on a body other than Earth.

In a project carried out out by an international team of astronomers with a telescope in New Zealand , a new class of planets has been found out in the universe: planets that do not orbit stars, but float freely out in space.

Solar 2, a sand-box game set in an infinite abstract universe in which the player is able to control planets and stars, is now available on Steam with a huge discount of 75%.Solar 2 is not your average sand box game.

On February 2, 2011, NASA announced that its Kepler space telescope found its first Earth-size planet. In fact, it found five Earth-size planets all orbiting about one star, Kepler-11.