Over the past decade or so, astronomers have speculated about the characteristics of rogue planets in the Milky Way galaxy. These "free-floating" worlds don't orbit stars, but instead roam the ...

For over a decade, a dim but persistent glow near the center of the Milky Way has confused astronomers. This mysterious ...

Not long ago, astronomers counted the number of “exoplanets” detected outside our own solar system in the teens, then in the hundreds. Today the tally stands at just over 700. But the new study, ...

The most common stars in the Milky Way may be even less friendly to life than previously suspected. New research suggests that red dwarf stars, stellar bodies smaller and less massive than the sun, ...

By combining the power of ground-based and space-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a new brown dwarf—a type of ...

Greetings! You can see all five visible planets this week, two in the early morning sky and three in the evening sky.

IMAGE: An artist’s impression of a free-floating planet. Using observations and archival data from several of NSF’s NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world ...

Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly "pristine" red giant with the lowest concentration of heavy elements ever seen in ...

Building on eight years of extraordinary discoveries by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS and SDSS-II), a new program of four coordinated surveys will revolutionize the study of the distant universe, ...

Using observations and archival data from several of NSF’s NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have discovered at least 70 ...

(AP) Our Milky Way is home to at least 17 billion planets that are similar in size to Earth, a new estimate suggests. That’s more than two Earth-size planets for every person on the globe. Just how ...