planet

Made up of rock and iron, this planet is thought to be tidally locked to it's parent star (meaning one side always faces the star), it is also much closer to it's host star than the Earth is to the Sun. This means that the "day" side of the planet is always molten, and that's just awesome.

Peering into the far reaches of the solar system, astronomers have spied a pink frozen world 7½ billion miles from the sun.

It's the second such object to be discovered in a region of space beyond Pluto long considered a celestial wasteland. Until now, the lone known resident in this part of the solar system was an oddball dwarf planet spotted in 2003 named Sedna after the mythological Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic.

Via: Scientific American:

Whatever you call may call it, Ceres is one of the most geologically interesting and strange objects in the solar system. Its shape, size and composition—round, roughly the size of Texas and at least 20 percent water ice—place it at the poorly understood transition point between rocky worlds like Earth and icy worlds like Jupiter’s Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus, and other large moons of the outer solar system. Other than blurry Hubble Space Telescope images from 2004, its surface had scarcely been glimpsed until Dawn’s approach. As the spacecraft’s ion engines slowly push it toward Ceres, the dwarf planet’s details are now coming into focus, revealing tantalizing new details with practically every new image.

This planet, GJ 504b, is about the size of Jupiter, but has several times its mass. It's actually so far the smallest planet that's ever been directly imaged with a telescope, rather than being observed by eclipsing its parent star.

...one of Einstein's weirder ideas has led to the identification of a new planet, about twice as massive as Jupiter, orbiting a star some 2,000 light-years from Earth — a discovery Einstein never even envisioned but one that may never have happened without him. Indeed, David Latham, a Harvard astronomer who collaborated on the discovery, originally doubted it was even possible to do what he (under Einstein's guiding hand) recently succeeded in doing. "I thought it was silly," he say

There once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years ago, and took roughly the same shape. Both were blistered with volcanoes and etched with watercourses; both circled the same yellow dwarf star—close enough to be warmed by it, but not so close as to be blasted to a cinder. Had an alien astronomer swivelled his telescope toward them in those days, he might have found them equally promising—nurseries in the making. They were large enough to hold their gases close, swaddling themselves in atmosphere; small enough to stay solid, never swelling into gaseous giants. They were "Goldilocks planets," our own astronomers would say: just right for life.

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 "habitable zone," the region where temperatures would allow liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, to exist.

About 500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus lives a star, which, though smaller and redder than the sun, has a planet that may look awfully familiar.

With a diameter just 10 percent bigger than Earth's, the newly found world is the first of its size found basking in the benign temperature region around a parent star where water, if it exists, could pool in liquid form.

Scientists on the hunt for Earth's twin are focused on worlds that could support liquid surface water, which may be necessary to brew the chemistry of life.

The Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets, including many that are similar to our own. But how many of these alien worlds have water, and do any host extraterrestrial life?

No answers to those questions just yet. But astronomers using a new infrared technique say they've discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant planet called "tau Boötis b."

The finding suggests that the technique may play an important role in identifying which exoplanets might be hospitable for life.

Via NASA:

The sprawling Caloris basin on Mercury is one of the solar system's largest impact basins, created during the early history of the solar system by the impact of a large asteroid-sized body. The multi-featured, fractured basin spans about 1,500 kilometers in this enhanced color mosaic based on image data from the Mercury-orbiting MESSENGER spacecraft. Mercury's youngest large impact basin, Caloris was subsequently filled in by lavas that appear orange in the mosaic. Craters made after the flooding have excavated material from beneath the surface lavas. Seen as contrasting blue hues, they likely offer a glimpse of the original basin floor material. Analysis of these craters suggests the thickness of the covering volcanic lava to be 2.5-3.5 kilometers. Orange splotches around the basin's perimeter are thought to be volcanic vents.