The discovery of an exomoon could be years away, but researchers are already theorizing the conditions under which liquid water might be found on their surfaces.

By Elizabeth Howell www.seeker.com 3-27-17

As some scientists search for habitable planets outside our solar system, other researchers are tackling a similar question for the moons of these planets. So-called exomoons have yet to be found outside our solar system, and a detection could be a decade away - or more.
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The European Space Agency’s Science Programme Committee has approved the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission to move into the construction phase. They aim to launch this deep-space observatory in 2026 with the goal of “discovering and

By Tom Ward futurism.com 7-4-17

characterizing Earth-sized planets and super-Earths orbiting Sun-like stars in the habitable zone” — although it “could eventually lead to the detection of extraterrestrial life,” according to a University of Warwick press release.

The observatory will have 26 telescopes on board and will be launched 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) into space, where, according to a mission summary, it will conduct “Ultra-high precision, long (up to several years), uninterrupted photometric monitoring in the visible band of very large samples of bright (mV ≤11) stars.” This will provide unprecedented data on distant planets.
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NASA will announce the latest crop of planet discoveries from the Kepler Space Telescope during a briefing Monday morning (June 19). The briefing will be at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) during the Kepler

BY Jesse Emspak Space.com 6-18-17

Science Conference at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. You can watch the exoplanet announcement here, courtesy of NASA TV. NASA will livestream the conference here: http://www.nasa.gov/live.
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Nearly 2,000 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but this just might be the strangest one yet.

Ed Mazza The Huffington Post 3-31-16

A lava-loaded “super earth” called 55 Cancri e is twice the size of our own planet but eight times as dense. And it’s so close to its star that a year lasts only 18 hours.

Just 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e may also be tidally locked to its sun the way the moon is to Earth. One side would be a blazing hot eternal night with temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other an even hotter permanent day, according to a heat map of the planet published in the journal Nature that used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

“The day side could possibly have rivers of lava and big pools of extremely hot magma, but we think the night side would have solidified lava flows like those found in Hawaii,” Michael Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a news release. [...]
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