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JPL scientist Michael Shao can remember what his college advisor told him when he first decided to venture into a little-known field called "stellar interferometry" for his graduate thesis.

A new discovery has the potential to answer the long-standing question of how massive stars are born -- and hints at the possibility that planets could form around the galaxy's biggest bodies.

For most college students, finals take in place inside a classroom, but one engineering class from Princeton University had the opportunity to present their work to a group of JPL's Team X engineers, who have contributed to missions ranging from GRACE to the famous Mars rovers.

Many scientists speculate that the galaxy could be full of places like Pandora from the movie "Avatar" -- Earth-like worlds in solar systems besides our own.

Spring is here, and with it, a fresh batch of new exoplanet discoveries, many from the prolific California and Carnegie Planet Search as well as the WASP planet search.