Cassini captures Titan and Dione against the sixth planet’s rings.

Roasted remains orbit former red giant. (p. 9)

The Kepler space telescope gets one step closer to its mission of discovering habitable worlds by finding two orbs of terrestrial proportions orbiting a distant sunlike star. (p. 10)

Extrasolar planet hunt spots its most Earthlike orb yet. (p. 11)

Nearly a year after receiving a spectacular celestial gift, astrophysicists are still asking: “What is it?” (p. 11)

The Cassini spacecraft captured images of massive tempest in planet’s northern hemisphere.

Like many siblings, Venus and Earth bear a familial resemblance. Venus is similar to Earth in size, composition and gravitational pull. But some peculiar quirks, from sulfuric acid clouds to swirling polar vortices, make Venus a twisted sister indeed. New results from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting the cloud-shrouded planet since 2006, suggest that beneath the acidic cloak lies an extreme world that provides an important point of comparison for understanding Earth’s evolution. “The more we actually get results from Venus, the more we see h... (p. 26)

Pockets of liquid water underlie fractured ice on the Jupiter moon’s surface, a new study concludes. (p. 5)