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

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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

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 ...

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

Join Robin Ince and Professor Jen Gupta for an evening of music and astrophysics with THE EXOPLANETS at Hackney Empire. Learn more about the event here!

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 ...

Detection of hydrogen sulfide in four HR 8799 gas giants provides evidence of solid accretion, clarifying how massive exoplanets form and distinguishing them from brown dwarfs ...

Relatedly, astronomers may have just pushed the upper size limit of what counts as a planet.