Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life. Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope.

A new survey is under way to search for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but this one has a twist: Instead of listening for alien signals from anywhere in the sky, scientists are aiming radio telescopes at the alien planets most likely to be like our own Earth

Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals. These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth's, and 375 times farther than Pluto's, which is why it hasn't been seen so far but scientists now believe the proof of its existence has already been gathered by a Nasa space telescope, Wise, and is just waiting to be analysed.

NASA unveiled a wealth of new data from its planet-seeking Kepler space telescope today (Feb. 2) - observations that significantly increase the number of possible alien planets and identify potential Earth-size worlds, including 54 planets that could be habita

Web users around the globe will be able to help professional astronomers in their search for Earth-like planets thanks to a new online citizen science project called Planet Hunters. Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA's Kepler mission.

A new multinational initiative plans to launch a satellite containing a large array of solar panels that would collect energy from the sun, then convert this energy into a microwave beam that could be directed back down to Earth. A special receiving antenna on the ground — called a rectenna — would then turn the microwave energy back into electricity, which would be fed into the power grid.

Can the rate of past discoveries be used to predict future ones? We may soon find out. Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011.

The search for dark energy might help in the search for life in the universe. That's because planet hunting through a technique called microlensing requires a similar sort of instrument as a dark energy mission.

Using the gravitational microlensing technique, a new study claims to have have detected a planet near Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbour.