Astronomers searching for Earth-like planets in other solar systems have made a breakthrough by taking a closer look at the surface of stars.

A new technique developed by an international team of researchers—led by Yale astronomers Rachael Roettenbacher, Sam Cabot, and Debra Fischer—uses a combination of data from ground-based and orbiting telescopes to distinguish between light signals coming from stars and signals coming from planets orbiting those stars.

A study detailing the discovery has been accepted by The Astronomical Journal.

"Our techniques pull together three different types of contemporaneous observations to focus on understanding the star and what its surface looks like," said Roettenbacher, a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at Yale and lead author of the paper.

Members of the public can now help teach an artificial intelligence algorithm to recognize scientific features in images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has enormous potential to change the way NASA's spacecraft study the universe. But because all machine learning algorithms require training from humans, a recent project asks members of the public to label features of scientific interest in imagery taken by NASA's Perseverance Mars rover.

Called AI4Mars, the project is the continuation of one launched last year that relied on imagery from NASA's Curiosity rover. Participants in the earlier stage of that project labeled nearly half a million images, using a tool to outline features like sand and rock that rover drivers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory typically watch out for when planning routes on the Red Planet.

A joint NASA-U.S. Naval Research Laboratory experiment dedicated to studying the origins of solar energetic particles—the Sun's most dangerous form of radiation—is ready for launch.

UVSC Pathfinder—short for Ultraviolet Spectro-Coronagraph Pathfinder—will hitch a ride to space aboard STPSat-6, the primary spacecraft of the Space Test Program-3 (STP-3) mission for the Department of Defense. STP-3 is scheduled to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 551 rocket no earlier than Nov. 22, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.