Beyond our solar system, countless alien worlds of lava, ice, water and noxious gas swirl through the cosmos. Here are some of the strangest exoplanets that scientists have discovered so far.

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 ...

Scientists have now found more than 5,000 planets existing beyond our solar system, NASA has announced. The Kepler Space Telescope , launched in 2009 and retired in 2018, led to the discovery of ...

Astronomers have found at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the same star 40 light-years away, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The findings were also ...

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, according to NASA. Jupiter’s radius is over 11 times the equatorial radius of the Earth.

NASA artist’s conception of a brown dwarf (main) and stock image of the planets in the solar system (inset). An object between 2 and 50 times the mass of Jupiter may have flown through our ...

An interstellar visitor. To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting star-size object tweaked these planets' paths around 4 billion years ago.

Earth, the largest of our solar system's four rocky planets, has a diameter of about 7,900 miles (12,750 km). Neptune, the smallest of its four gas planets, has a diameter of about 30,600 miles ...

The formation of the solar system is a challenging puzzle for modern astronomy and a terrific tale of extreme forces operating over immense timescales. Let's dig in.

Our Solar System is full of mysteries, but if the inner planets are a puzzle, the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space is a secondhand puzzle with half the pieces missing.

This link, called "trapping efficiency," shows how often scattered planets end up in stable wide orbits. The research found that in solar system-like conditions, trapping happens about 5–10% of ...

An interstellar visitor. To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting star-size object tweaked these planets' paths around 4 billion years ago.