The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as ...

Spotting Earth-like planets is nearly impossible with conventional telescopes, but researchers propose a bold fix: a rectangular design that can separate a planet’s faint glow from its blinding star.

"We show that this design can, in principle, find half of all existing Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars within 30 light-years in less than three years." To resolve nearby Earth-like ...

Concept design for a rectangular space telescope, modeled after the Diffractive Interfero Coronagraph Exoplanet Resolver (DICER), a notional infrared space observatory, and the James Webb Space ...