A distant star system with four super-sized gas giants has revealed a surprise. Thanks to JWST’s powerful vision, astronomers detected sulfur in their atmospheres — a chemical clue that they formed ...

Since the 1990s, scientists have discovered approximately 6,100 planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

Planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy tend to follow a particular pattern: rocky planets toward the center, closest to ...

Astronomers may finally understand why planets orbiting two suns, the real-world equivalents of the "Star Wars" planet ...

Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don't ...

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth. Of the more ...

A newly identified planet candidate, HD 137010 b, looks strikingly Earth-like in size and orbit — but it may be colder than Mars due to its dimmer star. If it has a thick enough atmosphere, though, ...

With this new survey, astronomers have gained a peek inside a stage of exoplanet system formation they have yet to fully ...

How any Earth-sized exoplanets exist, and how do we find them? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical ...

Key takeawaysIf a gas giant planet is big enough to ignite deuterium fusion, it becomes a brown dwarf instead of a planet.

If a gas giant planet is big enough to ignite deuterium fusion, it becomes a brown dwarf instead of a planet. But this definition is incomplete and does not tell us how gas giants form or what ...