Search for Alien Worlds

This video explores the famous solar system in the making, Beta Pictoris. Around this young hot star, a vast disk of dust and gas is now forming comets, asteroids, and planets.

Astronomers now know that planets around other stars are plentiful. But they do not fully understand how they form and there are many aspects of the formation of comets, planets and other rocky bodies that remain a mystery.

A new image from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, reveals extraordinarily fine detail that has never been seen before in the planet-forming disc around a young star.

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in Chile found out that 40 per cent of red dwarf stars are orbited by super-Earths. Red Dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy, so there might be tens of billions of such planets in our galaxy alone

Among the methods astronomers have used to discover extra solar planets, the most successful is a technique called transit photometry. It measures changes in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses in front of its star along our line of sight.

A Super Earth is a planet smaller than Neptune, but larger than Earth. There are no Super Earths in our solar system. But they may be the most common type of planet in our galaxy, according to data from the Kepler Space Telescope.

We can build powerful rockets able to carry people and machines into orbit, or even vault them to the moon. But our fastest spacecraft don't hold a candle to the distances that define Interstellar Flight. So what's on the drawing boards?

A new type of exoplanet finder distinguishes the polarized light of planet atmospheres from the light of their parent stars. It offers an ingenious new way to tease out the light of a planet with the overwhelming brightness of a star. Adapted from EsoCast

State of the art instrumentation is at the forefront of a blizzard of exoplanet discoveries in the last two decades. These observations are feeding an enormous expansion in knowledge about the diverse range of exoplanets in the Milky Way Galaxy.

On the hunt for exoplanets, an international team of astronomers is probing a class of nearby stars known as ultracool dwarf stars. These are very dim stars, much cooler and redder than the Sun, and not much larger than Jupiter. But they are quite common, accounting for around 15% of the stars near to the Sun.

The Pale Red Dot campaign was launched to find a planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. Incredibly, the quest succeeded and astronomers detected a planet. The planet, Proxima b, falls within the habitable zone of its host star. It is by far the closest potential abode for alien life.

The Pale Red Dot campaign was launched to find a planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. Incredibly, the quest succeeded and astronomers detected a planet. The planet, Proxima b, falls within the habitable zone of its host star. It is by far the closest potential abode for alien life.