The origin of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes has been revealed in a system of four young planets that are dramatically losing ...

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 ...

We have all been taught in school that planets revolve in the same direction as the Earth, i.e., in the counterclockwise ...

Scientists on Earth use seismometers to get a more detailed picture of what the inside of the Earth is made of. Those seismometers record vibrations from earthquakes. The vibrations change depending ...

When my colleagues and I send them out to explore our solar system, it's important for us to understand the 3D map of our ...

If you look across space with a telescope, you'll see countless galaxies, most of which host large central black holes, billions of stars and their attendant planets. The universe teems with huge, ...

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 ...

Astronomers using planet-hunting satellites have discovered a rare solar system with six planets moving completely in sync with one another, as if they were untouched by any outside force since being ...

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 ...

There’s a bit of a paradox about our galaxy: it’s both jam-packed with stars and cavernously empty. The Milky Way is crowded in the sense that it holds hundreds of billions of stars, as well as ...

A killer game of hide and seek.