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 Ghost of the Solar System: Why Can't We Find Planet 9? Deep in the outer reaches of our solar system, far beyond Neptune and Pluto, something massive is hiding in the dark. Scientists call it ...

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 ...

Earth has the perfect combination of a livable atmosphere and a protective magnetic field that prevents the Sun's harmful radiation and radioactive solar winds from damaging us, allowing us to live on ...

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 ...

Astronomers are reporting the detection of a large object entering our solar system, and it is causing quite the stir in the scientific community. But now a fourth and much larger object has been ...

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 ...

As telescopes have become more powerful, it’s turned out our solar system is not the only game in town: There are millions of other planets out there in the galaxy. But we’re still teasing out clues ...