Our search for exoplanets is focused on Milky Way stars. It's been successful, with more than 6,000 detected so far. Scientists are even beginning to move beyond mere detections, and working on ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. At least 500 million of those ...

What can the galactic habitable zone (GHZ), galactic regions where complex life is hypothesized to be able to evolve, teach scientists about finding the correct stars that could have habitable planets ...

There could be planets around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy – and we may be ready to find them, scientists say. That hope comes after researchers found the first ever binary ...

For the first time, scientists have built a digital version of the Milky Way that follows the motion of individual stars, not ...

Across the galaxy, astronomers now see that planetary systems fall into four broad classes, and our own solar system, part of the rare Ordered group, is only one of them. At the same time, discoveries ...

Our Milky Way galaxy is a cannibal. You might wonder what would happen if our disk-shaped spiral galaxy were to one day collide with Andromeda, which is over twice the size of the Milky Way.

For a decade and a half, astronomers have been on the trail of a galactic mystery. In 2011, a project that surveyed the Milky Way galaxy for exoplanets — which are planets beyond our solar system — ...

A new composite image of the Andromeda Galaxy is offering an unprecedented view of our closest spiral galactic neighbor. Composed by NASA and international space partners, the image combines data from ...