An exoplanet is what we call planets that exist outside of our own solar system. The first one was discovered in 1992, but as we get more powerful and precise telescopes and instruments, scientists ...

To misquote Hamlet, there seems to be more types of planets across the heavens than have been dreamt in our astronomy before the advent of dedicated planet-hunting telescopes. In the Solar System, we ...

Thanks to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets to date, we know that planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune orbit most stars. Oddly, our sun lacks such a planet. That’s been a source ...

Astronomers have finally figured out how the most common types of planets in our galaxy are formed—by watching a set of baby planets grow up in real time. These worlds, found in a young star system ...

Life on a planet ruled by two suns might be a little complicated. Two sunrises, two sunsets. Twice the radiation field. In a paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, astronomer Joel Kastner and ...

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

All of our solar system’s planets are lining up to parade through the night sky at once. This extraordinary celestial event will see the sky scattered with seven visible planets in what is known as a ...

A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four massive but extremely low-density worlds orbiting the star appear to be ...