Infant planets are ravenous little blighters that quickly devour what remains of the star-circling gas and dust clouds in which they form. The gas in these protoplanetary disks disappears rapidly ...

In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and planetary masses silently orbit their stars—sometimes thousands of ...

The smaller planets include a red orb with orange highlights, a blue orb with yellow highlights, and a dark blue orb. All of the colors look the same as they did previously, though they appear much ...

Since the discovery, scientists have gone back and forth on whether any planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system could be habitable. Much like the Proxima Centauri system and its Earth-like planet (Proxima b) ...

A cloud of collapsing gas created our Sun, the first thing to form in our solar system. This happened about . Then the planets began to emerge, as the billions of particles of gas and dust left ...

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 ...

As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in The Fellowship of the Ring, “Not all those who wander are lost.” But in the case of planets, it’s possible that most of them are. Rogue planets—planets that are ...

Smaller planets, it was revealed, tended to have nearly circular orbits, while larger giant planets have flattened, or elliptical, orbits. This would have been an important finding in isolation ...

Planets in the solar system. Credit: NASA and ESA / CC BY-SA 4.0 A rare celestial event will unfold on the evening of Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, when seven planets line up in the night sky in a phenomenon ...

Planetary alignment occurs when several planets gather closely on one side of the sun simultaneously, according to Starwalk.space. Planet parades are how astronomers and stargazers refer to the ...

Astute skywatchers may have already seen the striking line of planets across the night sky in January. This week Mercury joins the queue. Now every other world in our solar system will be visible ...