The cold and mysterious Oort cloud at the edge of our solar system may be hiding a rogue planet

The first asteroid belt ever found outside the solar system is more complex than expected

Modeling distant planets has revealed that tidal forces generated by their parent stars can combine with intense radiation bombardment and strip away their...

55 Cancri e is a super-Earth planet that appears composed of diamond-like carbon — now, thanks to the JWST, astronomers have found the world has "grown" a...

Jupiter played a key role in life developing on Earth, so to boost the search for life outside the solar system, scientists have built a catalog of small...

New observations of WASP-39 b reveal a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere of a planet -- sulfur dioxide -- among other details.

Planets are usually not much older than the stars around which they revolve. Take the Sun: it was born 4.6 billion years ago, and not long after that, Earth came into the world. But astronomers have discovered that a completely different scenario is also possible. Even if they are near death, some types of stars can possibly still form planets. If this is confirmed, theories on planet formation will need to be…

Post-starburst galaxies were previously thought to scatter all of their gas and dust -- the fuel required for creating new stars -- in violent bursts of energy, and with extraordinary speed. Now, new data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveals that these galaxies don't scatter all of their star-forming fuel after all. Instead, after their supposed end, these dormant galaxies hold onto…

A supernova is a stellar explosion, which occurs when the lives of some really massive stars come to an end. In this violent epilogue, the star expels the material from its outer layers by means of a shock wave, allowing us to see the various elements it was composed of.

In its early days, the Milky Way was like a giant smoothie, as if galaxies consisting of billions of stars, and an enormous amount of gas had been thrown together into a gigantic blender. But a new study picks apart this mixture by analyzing individual stars to identify which originated inside the galaxy and which began 'life' outside.

The unusual behavior of sulphur in Venus' atmosphere cannot be explained by an 'aerial' form of extra-terrestrial life, according to a new study.

Astrophysicists studying in unprecedented detail a red giant star named V Hydrae have witnessed the star's mysterious death throes. Researchers discovered that the carbon-rich star has expelled six slowly expanding molecular rings and two hourglass-shaped structures ejecting matter out into space at high speeds.

An astronomer and a group of eagle-eyed citizen scientists have discovered a giant gas planet hidden from view by typical stargazing tools.

Scientists have recently discovered scores of free-floating planets that defy classification—forcing them to rethink their theories of star and planet formation.

A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even better, candidates for…

Nearly half of Sun-size stars are binary. According to new research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars. This points to new targets in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.

The MAGIC telescopes have observed the nova RS Ophiuchi shining brightly in gamma rays at extremely high energy. The Gamma rays emanate from protons that are accelerated to very high energies in the shock front following the explosion. This suggests that novae are also a source of the ubiquitous cosmic radiation in the universe which consists mainly of protons rich in energy, which race through space at almost the…

Astronomers have discovered a strange new type of star covered in the by-product of helium burning. It is possible that the stars might have been formed by a rare stellar merger event.

Astronomers have identified two different cases of 'mini-Neptune' planets that are losing their puffy atmospheres and likely transforming into super-Earths.

Cool stars with powerful magnetic fields could have remarkably fast stellar winds that strip away their planets' atmospheres, making even "habitable zone...