The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this search. However, the ...

Planets may begin forming much earlier than scientists once believed during the final stages of a star s birth, not afterward. This bold new model, backed by simulations from researchers at SwRI, ...

Short-lived radioisotopes such as aluminum-26 influenced early solar system heat, water retention and the formation of Earth-like rocky planets, according to meteorite analyses and models.

The recent discovery of a potential new class of distant and mysterious “free-floating” planets has intrigued astronomers since stunning new images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope were ...

An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density 'super-puff' planets has at least one more planet, according to new observations. An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low ...

Roughly 1,000 light-years away from Earth, a gigantic disk of gas and dust is swirling around a young star and giving rise to ...

In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests, oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider ...

One of the most notable properties of the giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—are the extreme winds observed around their equators. While some of these planets have ...

In the remote outer reaches of planetary systems, far beyond the orbit of known planets, enormous and mysterious worlds silently loop around their stars. Some drift as far as 10,000 times the distance ...