An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course. When ...

A new research paper, published in the Science Advances journal, has postulated that rocky planets like ours may be far more common than we previously believed. Previously, scientists had concurred ...

Just decades after the first exoplanets were identified, our database of the distant worlds—monitored by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute—has breached a new threshold. Now, astronomers have ...

Hubble observations reveal a giant, turbulent planet-forming disk that may reshape theories of how planetary systems develop.

For life to develop on a planet, certain chemical elements are needed in sufficient quantities. Phosphorus and nitrogen are ...

Are planets in the solar system that are closer to the Sun older than the ones further away? – Gavriel, age 10, Paducah, Kentucky A cloud of collapsing gas created our Sun, the first thing to form in ...

We’ve found lots of “habitable” worlds but we don’t know what factors are needed for life. There are lots of reasons to search for planets around other stars—exoplanets. A big one is to find other ...

'We're showing that, everywhere we look now, there was some sort of magnetic field that was responsible for bringing mass to where the sun and planets were forming.' When you purchase through links on ...