How do we find planets -- even habitable planets -- around other stars? By looking for tiny dimming as a planet passes in front of its sun, TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz and the Kepler mission have found some 1,200 potential new...

The SETI Institute's Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish: to accelerate our search for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she and her team listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the...

We live in an unusual age - the age when the stars still shine. We should count ourselves lucky - nearly all of future history will be dark. But events will still unfold in that long, cooling darkness, and civilizations may endure. So...

So the Mars Rovers didn't scoop up any alien lifeforms. Scientist Penelope Boston thinks there's a good chance -- a 25 to 50 percent chance, in fact -- that life might exist on Mars, deep inside the planet's caves. She details how we...

There are three types of solar systems in the universe: ordered, anti-ordered and mixed. Anti-ordered systems are those where large planets are closer to the star and become smaller as they move away. In mixed systems, the planets are...

The TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system has seven earth-like planets and is only 39 lightyears away! I am joined by Professor Adam Burgasser and Dr. Katherine Deck, both astrophysicists on the Nature paper to discuss the discovery of this...

A conversation with Alan Rhodes, instrument development manager for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and Harvey Moseley a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space...

The next stop on our virtual tour is Venus, the closest planet to Earth and the hottest planet in our solar system, with surface temperatures scorching enough to melt lead.

The Webb Space Telescope will study planetary bodies with our solar system and planets orbiting other stars to help scientists better understand how planets form and how they evolve.<b<b<br/>r/>r/>