Washington, June 7 (ANI): New observations from ALMA have provided answer to one of the biggest questions: how do tiny grains of dust in the disc around a young star grow bigger and bigger - to eventually become rubble, and even boulders well beyond a metre in size?

Washington, June 7 (ANI): Stars have an alluring pull on planets, especially those in a class called hot Jupiters, which are gas giants that form farther from their stars before migrating inward and heating up.

Washington, June 7 (ANI): An international team of exoplanet hunters, including astronomers at the University of Arizona, is developing a new technology that would dramatically improve the odds of discovering planets with conditions suitable for life-such as having liquid water on their surface.

Washington, June 6 (ANI): A new research has suggested that our Sun was both active and "feisty" in its infancy, growing in fits and starts while burping out bursts of X-rays.

Washington, June 4 (ANI): A highly unusual dwarf star and its powerful flares, is being studied, which may hold clues to the likelihood of life on other planets as well as to the behavior of our Sun.

Washington, June 4 (ANI): NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.

Washington, May 21 (ANI): Three planets - Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury will present a spectacular sky show during the last week of May.

Washington, May 17 (ANI): The Kepler space telescope - NASA's primary instrument for detecting planets beyond our solar system-had suffered a critical failure and could soon be shut down permanently, the agency's officials announced Wednesday, May 15.

Washington, May 15 (ANI): The discovery of hundreds of planet candidates around other stars by Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009, has inspired a new book that combines both science and science fiction.

Washington, May 10 (ANI): The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster.

Washington, May 7 (ANI): Thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, researchers are beginning to dissect an exotic class of exoplanets, called hot Jupiters, revealing raging winds and other aspects of their turbulent nature.

London, May 1(ANI): A new research has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot.

Washington, April 30 (ANI): An international team of astronomers has identified and characterized two new exoplanets thanks to combined observations from the Kepler space telescope plus the SOPHIE and HARPS-N spectrographs.

Washington, April 28 (ANI): A startling prediction made by a team of researchers has challenged existing chemical models and current understanding of planetary interiors - magnesium oxide, a major material in the formation of planets, can exist in several different compositions.

Washington, April 26 (ANI): A new technique employed by a University of Washington astronomer uses Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.

Washington, April 25 (ANI): The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to be launched by NASA in 2018, will be capable of detecting oxygen and water in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf after only a few hours of observation time-much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star, say researchers.

Washington, Apr 20 (ANI): Two super-Earth planets, which had been discovered by NASA's Kepler mission along with a new planetary system that is home to five small planets around a slightly smaller star than the Sun, may sustain life after all.

Washington, April 19 (ANI): Scientists have discovered two Earth-like planets in the habitable orbit of a Sun-like star.

Washington, April 10 (ANI): Thanks to the sensitive far-infrared detection capabilities of the ESA's Herschel space observatory, astronomers have been able to obtain the first images of a dust belt - produced by colliding comets or asteroids - orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system.

Washington, April 8 (ANI): A rotary fuel delivery valve developed by a University of Alabama in Huntsville team just might help manned space flights travel to other planets one day.

Washington, Apr 6 (ANI): NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected two missions for launch in 2017 - a planet-hunting satellite and an International Space Station instrument to observe X-rays from stars.

Washington, Apr 4 (ANI): Researchers at The University of Auckland have proposed a new method for finding Earth-like planets, and they anticipate that the number will be about 100 billion.

Washington, April 3 (ANI): Researchers are trying to understand the nature of the turbulence in protoplanetary disks to find out how this swirling masses of warm dust and gas may potentially become celestial bodies such as planets and asteroids.

Washington, March 27 (ANI): About 66 million years ago a mountain-sized asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan in Mexico at exactly the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction.

Washington, March 14 (ANI): Scientists across the UK are proudly celebrating the monumental achievement of the completion of ALMA - the most complex ground-based telescope in existence.