From little red dwarfs to big blue blazers, stars of all masses seem to form planets robustly. That's just one item from the latest crop of exoplanet news.

NASA scientists announced this morning that the Kepler planet-hunting probe is working great, has produced a slew of results, and is working at high enough precision that it should be able to determine the abundance, or rarity, of Earth-size worlds galaxy-wide.

The first super-Earth seen transiting its star has the same density as rocky Earth. Now a second one has a the same mass but a lower density — indicating that it's water almost all the way through, with a massive atmosphere to boot.

Thirty new extrasolar planets are announced, including more super-Earths and some that orbit low-metallicity stars.

A "super-Earth" planet discovered last February turns out to be just as dense and rocky as Earth. But with its day side seared to perhaps 2,700°F, there might not be much solid ground to stand on.

Observers have found a massive planet so close to its star that it orbits in less than a day. Either they were very, very lucky — or theorists really don't understand the inner workings of stars as well as they thought.

Within the past 1,000 years or so, two planet-size objects collided around the young star HD 172555 and created a titanic, white-hot fireball whose glassy ashes are still swarming around the star.

After just 1½ weeks of test observations, scientists are confident that the Kepler spacecraft is well on its way to discovering Earthlike planets around distant stars.

Astronomers have detected individual starspots by watching exoplanets cross in front of them. New advances may enable extensive mapping of stars' spottedness by this technique, filling gaps left by other methods.

Protoplanetary disks around three young stars turn out to have large central holes, which were presumably cleared by still-growing Jupiter-mass planets. But there’s a problem: the stars are too young.

After decades of frustration and false alarms, astronomers may finally have a new method in their toolkit for finding planets around other stars: astrometry.

Researchers are developing a method to detect oceans and clouds on planets orbiting other stars. To test this idea, they aimed the telescope aboard NASA’s Deep Impact probe toward Earth, and made a rough map of our world.

Way out in the circumstellar cold, a planet and a rubble disk orbit bright Fomalhaut. Does this have anything to do with the star's own rotation?

After a dramatic and flawless liftoff, NASA's newest space observatory is getting ready to observe a tract of Milky May with a single-minded purpose: find as many alien worlds as it can.

Astronomers have found the smallest transiting exoplanet yet, with a silhouette only about 1.7 Earth diameters wide. It's also the fastest-orbiting planet known, with a "year" lasting 20 hours.

Astronomers have found a "hot Jupiter" whose atmospheric temperature jumps nearly 1,300°F in just six hours! That gives a whole new meaning to "global warming."

Here's a star-buying scheme we can support.

Three planets orbit the red dwarf star Gliese 876, and at least two of them do so in nearly the same plane, according to an ingenious new study of their interaction.

Around newborn stars, Jupiters seem to grow quicker than expected.

An international team of observers has found an alien world where the temperature is always a toasty 4,600°F and it takes just a second or two to get a great suntan.

Astronomers report that a planet circling a star 63 light-years away in Vulpecula is wreathed in an atmosphere containing water vapor.

A tiny, glowing dot apparently orbits just inside the inner edge of the dusty debris disk surrounding the star Beta Pictoris, 64 light-years away.

Although questions remain, it appears that astronomers have at last taken images of actual planets orbiting other stars.

What will be the best ways to discover extrasolar planets in the coming years? The best scientific payoffs demand smart planning now.

Think our planetary family is normal? Think again. It turns out that the Sun and its retinue formed when the interstellar mix was just right — not too much gas, not too little, and stirred gently for just the right amount of time.

A recent survey of stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster reveals that less than 10% of stars there have enough material in their surrounding disks to form Jupiter-sized planets.

Jupiter-like exoplanets are outnumbered by smaller planets three to one, say astronomers describing their cutting-edge work in progress.

The SuperWASP project finds 10 new extrasolar planets crossing the faces of their stars.

Precise measures by Hubble indicate that a roasting "hot Jupiter" close to its star has an atmosphere thick with dust.

The Sun-like star 55 Cancri, just 41 light-years away, is now known to have at least five planets orbiting it.

Using modest gear and a lot of skill, amateur astronomers catch a record-breaking planet crossing the face of its star 250 light-years away.

Astronomers have discovered possibly the biggest exoplanet yet. TrES-4 is about 70% wider than Jupiter and has the average density of balsa wood.

A star 150 light-years away is surrounded by a disk of debris that might indicate that hidden planets are throwing their weight around.