Researchers have described a new, lower size limit for planets to maintain surface liquid water for long periods of time, extending the so-called Habitable or 'Goldilocks'' Zone for small, low-gravity planets. This research expands the search area for life in the universe and sheds light on the important process of atmospheric evolution on small planets.

A rocky extrasolar moon (exomoon) with bubbling lava may orbit a planet 550 light-years away from us. This is suggested by an international team of researchers on the basis of theoretical predictions matching observations. The 'exo-Io' would appear to be an extreme version of Jupiter's moon Io.

A new study by astronomers has found that the temperature on the nightsides of different hot Jupiters -- planets that are similar size in to Jupiter, but orbit other stars -- is surprisingly uniform, suggesting the dark sides of these massive gaseous planets have clouds made of minerals and rocks.

An icy ocean world in our solar system that could tell us more about the potential for life on other worlds is coming into focus with confirmation of the Europa Clipper mission's next phase.

Coordinated observations of Jupiter in early 2017 by six ground-based telescopes and Hubble allowed astronomers to study the evolution of bright plumes and connect them with cloud movements deep in the planet. They show that these plumes originate 80 kilometers below the surface cloud deck and rise up quickly into the stratosphere, where supercooled ammonia freezes to form ammonia ice clouds. The plumes create disturbances in the belts and even change their color.

About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and the new range of temperatures around the planet set the stage for a boom of new species evolving. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

When 'Oumuamua passed through our solar system two years ago, it set off a flurry of excitement in the astronomical community. Here was the first-ever interstellar object that be observed by human trackers, and the mysteries surrounding its true nature and composition led to some pretty interesting theories. There were even some proposals for a rapid mission that would be able to rendezvous with it.

Analysis of a bright flash in Jupiter's atmosphere observed by an amateur astronomer in August 2019 has revealed that the likely cause was a small asteroid with a density typical of stony-iron meteors. The impact is estimated to have released energy equivalent to an explosion of 240 kilotons of TNT—around half the energy released in the 2013 Chelyabinsk event at Earth. The results have been presented today at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva.

With more than 4,000 exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than our sun—discovered so far, it may seem like we are on the cusp of finding out whether we are alone in the universe. Sadly though, we don't know much about these planets—in most cases just their mass and their radius.

In The Little Prince, the classic novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the titular prince lives on a house-sized asteroid so small that he can watch the sunset any time of day by moving his chair a few steps.