WASHINGTON – Astronomers have observed a planetary system that challenges current planet formation theories, with a rocky planet that formed beyond the orbits of its gaseous neighbors, possibly after ...

A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four massive but extremely low-density worlds orbiting the star appear to be ...

Every once in a while, the outer solar system reminds us that we've only discovered a negligible portion of it, and that the vast majority is still full of surprises. The latest example of this is a ...

The first few exoplanets were discovered in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when astronomers began carrying out large-scale, long-term surveys of other stars, that we started to ...

The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to ...

It may not feel like it, but everything in the universe is in constant motion. Our Sun, with all its planets, orbits the center of the Milky Way, flying through the cosmos at around 450,000 miles per ...

Nothing manmade has reached further from Earth than the Voyager series of spacecraft. Hurtling away from the sun at 38,000 miles an hour, the duo have now traveled over 12 billion miles, with Voyager ...

This gas cloud located 500 light years away from our solar system is about to become a planet.This process usually takes a few hundred million years, but what if we made it happen much quicker. And ...

Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying itself, melting large portions of our planet’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later pulled ...

For the first time, astronomers say they have spotted a giant explosion released by a star beyond our solar system. The eruption was similar in some ways to those unleashed by our sun, such as the ...

Illustration comparing the planets of the Solar System and the Sun on the same scale. The planets are shown to scale relative to each other but their distances are not. From left to right the bodies ...

When you see art of our solar system as the planet orbit the sun, you may notice that Earth's orbit has a tilt. It is not a perfect circle. What's more, Earth is not the only planet that displays such ...