(CNN) — German astronomer Johannes Kepler made sketches of sunspots in 1607 from his observations of the sun’s surface — and centuries later, the pioneering drawings are helping scientists solve a ...

Scientists have discovered a distant solar system very much like our own, in which the orbits of all known planets lie in nearly the same plane and are aligned with the star's rotation. In recent ...

AMES, Iowa – An international team of astronomers has used nearly three years of high precision data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to make the first observations of a planet outside our solar system ...

"Half-forgotten" sunspot drawings by Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler are showing us more about how the sun's cycle of activities work. "The group's findings … offer a key to resolving the ...

How many exoplanets are in the cosmos and what can they tell us about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an ...

NASA’s Kepler observatory should be able to detect planetary moons – yet to be discovered – formed by far-away planetary collisions outside our Solar System, research by Amy Barr of the Planetary ...

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has found 11 new planetary systems, including one with five planets all orbiting closer to their parent star than Mercury circles the Sun, scientists said ...

NASA’s Kepler Mission has released 43 days of science data on more than 156,000 stars. These stars are being monitored for subtle brightness changes as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like planets ...