Planetary habitability

Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago.

There are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy, but how many of those are potentially habitable?

In their search for potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, astronomers looked for exoplanets similar to Terra. Scientists now have a new class of habitable exoplanets to look for: the Hycean planets.

The study looked at various factors that could presumably lead to a habitable environment

NASA scientists have discovered the basic organic ingredients necessary for the existence of life in the water found in the ice plumes of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

It will take two million years to reach K2-18b, a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of red dwarf K2-18, according to Angelos Tsiaras of the University College London's Center for Space Exochemistry Data (CSED) and the leader of one of the research teams that last week detected water vapor in its atmosphere.

Two planets that orbit around a star like our own sun could support life, according to new research, reported The Independent.

Two potentially habitable “super-Earths” orbit a star just 12 light years away that is our nearest sun-like neighbour, scientists have discovered.

The worlds at the edges of Tau Ceti’s “habitable zone” belong to a solar system of four rocky planets similar in size to Earth.

SUPER-EARTH LHS 1140B

Only a few decades ago, the thought of any alien planets existing in the reaches of space were just hypothetical ideas. Now, we know of thousands of such planets – and today, scientists may have discovered the best candidate yet for alien life.

Only 39 light-years away, astronomers have found seven planets circling a very small "red dwarf" star called Trappist-1. All seven are in or near what we call the "Goldilocks zone": Not too hot, not too cold, but just right for water to remain liquid on the planet. So we all speculate once again, but a little more bravely this time, about whether some of these planets might be home to life.