Astronomers have discovered an alien planet that wobbles at such a dizzying rate that its seasons must fluctuate wildly. Throughout all of the planet's fast-changing seasons, however, no forecast would be friendly to humans. The warm planet is a gassy super-Neptune that orbits too close to its two parent stars to be in its system's "," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist. The faraway world, which lies 2,300 light-years...

(NASA) Scientists have solved the mystery of the strange "jelly doughnut" rock on Mars. NASA's Opportunity rover spotted an odd Martian rock that looked like a doughnut on Jan. 8. Four days earlier, however, the rock wasn't there at all. So how did the rock appear? Alien rock throwers? A nearby meteorite impact? The truth is much less surprising. Scientists working with the intrepid robot have just confirmed that the rock (called Pinnacle Island) was simply kicked up by one...

Artist's view of a watery asteroid in the white-dwarf system GD 61. (NASA, ESA, M.A. Garlick, University of Warwick, and University of Cambridge) An asteroid the size of three football fields is set to make a close brush of Earth on Monday (Feb. 17), and you can watch the flyby in a live webcast. Near-Earth asteroid2000EM26poses no threat of actually hitting the planet, but the online Slooh Space Camera will track the asteroid as it passes by Earth on Monday....

Scientists have detected water vapor features around the hot Jupiter Tau Bootis b. (Alexandra Lockwood/Caltech) Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers. Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in theMilky Waycontain water like Earth, researchers said. The exoplanet Tau Boötis b was discovered in 1996, when the search for worlds...

Water fills the empty spacesuit helmet of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano in an Aug. 27, 2013 test of the faulty spacewalking gear, which forced NASA to abort a July 16 spacewalk for safety reasons. (NASA TV) A potentially deadly spacesuit water leak that nearly drowned an Italian astronaut during a spacewalk last July was one of the scariest close calls in NASA's spacewalk history. In fact, the spacesuit also leaked during an earlier spacewalk, but went undetected at the time,...

Naming landmarks on Mars isn't just for scientists and rover drivers anymore. Now, anybody with an Internet connection and a few dollars to spare can give a moniker to one of the Red Planet's 500,000 or so unnamed craters, as part of a mapping project run by the space-funding company Uwingu. "This is the first people's map of Mars, where anybody can play," said Uwingu CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief who also heads the space agency's New...

NASA's newest weather satellite soared into space Thursday, kicking off a mission to observe rainfall and snowfall around the globe in unprecedented detail. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint effort between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), blasted off aboard an H-2A rocket from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center today at 1:37 p.m. EST (1837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. Feb. 28 local Japan time). GPM will deliver near real-time observations of precipitation every three hours all over...

NASA hopes to launch a mission to the Jupiter moon Europa, perhaps the solar system's best bet to host alien life, a decade or so from now, officials announced Tuesday. The White House's 2015 federal budget request, which was released Tuesday, allocates $15 million to help develop a mission to Europa, which harbors a potentially life-supporting ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell. "Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high radiation environment, and there's lots...

An asteroid at least the size of a 60-story building will make a distant flyby of Earth this week, and you can watch astronomers track the space rock in a live webcast, weather-permitting. The asteroid poses no threat to Earth. The online Slooh community observatory will host the free webcast at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) to track asteroid 2014 CU13, a space rock about 623 feet (190 meters) wide discovered on Feb. 11 that will pass Earth at a...

Expedition 38 crewmembers, from left, Mike Hopkins, Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy gather inside the International Space Station's Kibo laboratory for a crew portrait before their return to Earth. (NASA) An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts made a snowy but safe landing on Earth late Monday, bringing their 5 1/2-month mission aboard the International Space Station to a successful close. A Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy touched down on...

Something never before seen is going on in space right now. A super massive black hole could swallow a gas cloud. ...

Researchers studying the Big Bang have found remarkable evidence that the newly-formed universe expanded rapidly, a discovery that, if confirmed, would be a major advance in the understanding of the early universe. A new study reveals that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the newly formed universe ballooned out at a pace so astonishing that it left behind ripples in the fabric of the cosmos. Although many scientists already believed that an initial, extremely rapid growth spurt...