An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how ...

In a conventional system like our own, rocky planets such as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars orbit closest to the host star. Farther out, gas giants ...

A newly studied solar system breaks the usual planet pattern, raising fresh questions about how rocky and gas planets form.

Four galaxies crowd the center of a collapsing structure 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. Each one is churning out stars at a pace that defies comparison with the present-day universe. Around ...

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

In late winter, the zodiacal light is visible in the evening in the Northern Hemisphere (false dusk) and in the pre-dawn ...

Out in the Kuiper Belt, the massive doughnut of debris beyond Neptune, about one in 10 kilometer-scale objects have surprised scientists with their unexpected shape. Rather than resembling a ball, ...

Today (Feb. 17), an annular solar eclipse will commence its journey across a remote region of Antarctica where it will be visible to more penguins than people. The partial solar eclipse portion of the ...

Astronomers have long debated why so many icy objects in the outer solar system look like snowmen. Michigan State University ...

It was a bold thought experiment: that only one electron makes up the entire universe. The most famous conversation about it took place between Richard Feynman, PhD, and John Wheeler, PhD, both ...

Astronomers have finally figured out how the most common types of planets in our galaxy are formed—by watching a set of baby planets grow up in real time. These worlds, found in a young star system ...