It looks like GJ 1214b might have an atmosphere that's made mostly out of water." That pushes this planet into "a category of its own in a way that was never certain before," says Kreidberg.

In their Nature paper, the researchers measured the infrared light that GJ 1214b emitted over the course of about 40 hours -- the time it takes the planet to orbit its star. As day turns to night ...

Meet GJ 1214b, the most Earth-like planet ever found outside our solar system. It’s not exactly Earth’s twin: It’s about six times bigger, a whole lot hotter and made mostly of water. But ...

GJ 1214b thus appears to have much more water than Earth does, and much less rock. The alien planet's interior structure is likely quite different from that of our world.

While studying GJ 1214b, researchers tracked the planet through nearly its entire orbit over the course of about 40 hours, according to NASA. The planet's year takes only 1.6 Earth days.

GJ 1214b was discovered in late 2009, but until now, our picture of it has been murky. “It’s been an extremely frustrating planet to study because it has all these clouds in the atmosphere, which ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the existence of a completely new type of planet. By analyzing the previously identified world GJ 1214b -- an Earth-like superplanet located outside ...

GJ 1214b thus appears to have much more water than Earth does, and much less rock. The alien planet's interior structure is likely quite different from that of our world.

GJ 1214b has a mass 6.5 times that of Earth and is 2.6 times its radius. By measuring the absorption spectra of the planet’s atmosphere, astronomers were able to shed light onto its composition.

GJ 1214b is a strange planet. It has a radius about 2.7 times that of Earth and a mass roughly eight times greater. It’s ...

Astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at a common kind of planet that's bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. What they saw wasn't what they expected.

"GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of," study lead author Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement.