Using a potent NASA space telescope to scan the skies for planets like ours where life might exist, astronomers said Thursday they have found the most Earth-like candidates yet. Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone -- not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water, researchers said in the journal Science. "These two are our best candidates that might be habitable," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Light captured from when the Universe was still in its childhood has shown a massive galaxy that churned out nearly 3,000 stars per year, a rate 2,000 greater than our own Milky Way today, astronomers said on Wednesday. The galaxy, called HFLS3, has a mass of stars nearly 40 billion times the mass of the Sun. Its light, snared by a network of 12 telescopes, was emitted around 12.8 billion years ago, less than 900 million years after the birth of the cosmos, according to their study, published in Nature.

President Barack Obama wants NASA to start work on finding a small asteroid that could be shifted into an orbit near the moon and used by astronauts as a stepping-stone for an eventual mission to Mars, agency officials said on Wednesday.The project, which envisions that astronauts could visit such an asteroid as early as 2021, is included in Obama’s $17.7 billion spending plan for the US space agency for the 2014 fiscal year.It is intended as an expansion of existing initiatives to find asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth, and preparations for a human exp

NASA wants to grab a small asteroid and tow it into orbit around the moon, as part of a long-range plan towards establishing permanent manned outposts in space, according to a US senator.To get the project off the ground, US President Barack Obama will propose around $100 million for the US space agency in his 2014 budget, which he submits to Congress on Wednesday, Senator Bill Nelson said in a statement.The Florida Democrat explained that this is part of what will be a much broader program.The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways