Artwork of flying or floating alien creatures above the clouds on a massive terrestrial planet. Very massive rocky planets are expected to have such dense atmospheres that life on the ground could be virtually impossible owing to the great pressure o...

Animation of alien plants, giant fungi and flying creatures on a hospitable foreign world. ...

HD 209458 is a star with an extrasolar planet. The planet, HD 209458b or Osiris, orbits so close to its parent star (only a few stellar diameters away) that star's stellar wind is gradually stripping away the planet's atmosphere, to form a long, come...

HD 209458 is a star with an extrasolar planet. The planet, HD 209458b or Osiris, orbits so close to its parent star (only a few stellar diameters away) that star's stellar wind is gradually stripping away the planet's atmosphere, to form a long, come...

Artwork of an imaginary planetary nebula. This is a glowing shell of gas cast off by a star near the end of its life. The star can be seen at the centre of the nebula. The Sun will one day form a planetary nebula, once its internal stock of hydrogen ...

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star some 20 light-years beyond the Sun. Scientists have confirmed the discovery there of three exoplanets, with another two candidates awaiting confirmation. This illustration depicts the most massive of the three planets, ...

Kepler-444 A is an orange main-sequence star twice the age of the Sun, an incredible 11 billion years old. Orbiting this are two red dwarfs (center, right) and five known planets. All planets orbit so close to their parent star that life as we know i...

Animation of the planet Proxima b seen from orbit around its parent Proxima Centauri....