Astronomers have confirmed a Saturn-size world drifting alone in deep space roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth, a discovery that turns a once-theoretical idea into a measured reality. The planet ...

Scientists have used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting space telescope 'Kepler' to discover that small and large worlds have very different upbringings. The team found that larger planets on non ...

Planets travel alone in space, without a parent star. These wandering worlds, far from being rare, might even be extremely ...

Most of the planets we’ve identified are in orbit around stars and formed from the disks of gas and dust that surrounded the ...

Studying the orbits of thousands of exoplanets shows that large planets tend to have elliptical orbits, while smaller planets tend to have more circular orbits. This split coincides with several other ...

New discoveries and fresh looks at familiar worlds show how far exoplanet science has come — and how much remains unknown. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

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 ...

Five years ago, astronomers revealed a spectacular collection of other worlds: the TRAPPIST-1 system. Newspapers around the world printed the discovery on their front pages: Astronomers had found that ...

It’s often said—we said it again ourselves just last week, in fact—that our own Solar System isn’t as typical as scientists once imagined. We’ve got four small, close-in, rocky planets (Mercury ...

"There really is something very different about how these giant planets form versus how small planets like Earth form." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission ...