... Meanwhile, a third star, 677C, orbits this central pair much further out, around 230 AU away. Gliese 677C has two confirmed exoplanets in orbit around it, and several others have been claimed. This illustration imagines the scene from a rocky planet ...

This illustration shows a hypothetical, Saturn-like gas giant planet (an exoplanet) viewed from a surface of one of its satellites. Another satellite is seen in the sky. The planet is eclipsing its parent star, which is lighting up its atmosphere lik...

This is an artwork of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS was launched by NASA in April 2018, the successor to Kepler. It has a two-year mission, during which it will be hunting for extrasolar planets transiting their stars. It is ...

Kepler-35 is a binary star system, around which astronomers have found a so-called transiting circumbinary exoplanet, Kepler-35b. That is, a planet which orbits both stars as if they were one. This image imagines the view from the surface of a moon o...

Proxima is the nearest star to the Sun. It is a dim red dwarf, smaller than our Sun and a great deal fainter. Here we see it from Proxima b, a recently discovered exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf. To the right you can also make out Alpha Centauri, wh...

This image shows the view from a planet on the outskirts of a globular cluster such as 47 Tucanae. These are vast assemblages of up to a million ageing stars. If our Solar System could move to a more attractive lot of celestial real estate, such as t...

This is the view from a planet in a close orbit around a magnetic flare star. These stars have such gigantic episodes of magnetic activity that they must have huge starspots, some of which have actually been imaged. Life on a nearby planet would be i...

This illustration was commissioned for one of my recent books, Cosmic Menagerie: A Visual Journey Through the Universe. It is an impression of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, also known as the Great Barred Spiral. It lies about 56 million light-ye...

In this image I imagine an Earth-like world in orbit around not a single star but a close binary. What beautiful sunsets could be witnessed from this world. In the sky I have added a giant satellite, its night side illuminated by cities, betraying in...

This classic space art example was commissioned for one of my recent books, Cosmic Menagerie: A Visual Journey Through the Universe. It imagines the view from the surface of a rocky world orbiting a blue giant star. These, such as Rigel in Orion, hav...