When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Artwork depicting how water, both regular and heavy, comes from giant molecular clouds and is ...

Astronomers have long believed that planetary systems follow a familiar blueprint. Small rocky planets ...

An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how ...

Astronomers studying a dim red dwarf star called LHS 1903 have found a four-planet system with an architecture that defies the standard rules of how rocky worlds take shape. The outermost planet in ...

Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy ...

Artist impression of the planetary system with four planets,around a small red star,called LHS1903. Caption: Astronomers have long thought solar systems follow a simple pattern similar to our own: ...

Astronomers have found a distant world that challenges planetary formation theory, with a rocky planet where gas giants should be.

Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don't ...

Astronomers have found a planet-forming disk that looks like a solar system on steroids. New images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed an enormous, oddly shaped disk of gas and dust ...

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...