Darwin will be a flotilla of four or five free-flying spacecraft that will search for Earth-like planets around other stars and analyse their atmospheres for the chemical signature of life.

Kailash Sahu is the leading author of a report published Nature in which he describes the finding of 16 new extrasolar planets in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, using the Hubble Telescope. He answers Scitizen’s questions.

Sean Raymond is co-author of a report published recently in Science, in which he describes how Earth-mass planets can form during the “giant planet migration”, from surviving material, often in the habitable zone.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered new evidence that planets might rise up out of a dead star's ashes. The infrared telescope surveyed the scene around a pulsar, the remnant of an exploded star, and found a surrounding disk made up of debris shot out during the star's death throes. The dusty rubble in this disk might ultimately stick together to form planets. David Kaplan is one of the autors of the report published in the April 6 issue of Nature.

Interview with Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, leader of an international collaboration of 73 atronomers who just reported in Nature the discovery of the first planet akin to Earth.