The origin of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes has been revealed in a system of four young planets that are dramatically losing ...

— -- Goldilocks, like most fairy tales, offers children a lesson and a happy ending. Whether a Goldilocks planet offers astronomers something similar still hangs up in the air, with the story's ...

In theory, a planet may be able to orbit a binary star system in a figure of eight, but it may not be particularly stable, ...

Exoplanets like Earth have been discovered but not all Earth-like planets are equal when it comes to alien life.

Despite its unmemorable name, J2322-2650 is a strange system. A Jupiter-sized exoplanet orbits an energetic neutron star, which constantly bombards it with gamma rays. Now, a team of astronomers has ...

This illustration shows an exoplanet orbiting around two brown dwarfs –– objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers have discovered a ...

A team of international researchers led by Tomas Stolker in the Netherlands has imaged a young gas giant exoplanet near a 12-million-year-old star. The planet is orbiting a star whose planet formation ...

In a real-life twist on Star Wars' Tatooine—a harsh desert planet with twin suns and a criminal underbelly—astronomers have found a bizarre new world that orbits two stars at a perfect right angle.

Studying the orbits of thousands of exoplanets shows that large planets tend to have elliptical orbits, while smaller planets tend to have more circular orbits. This split coincides with several other ...

A Tatooine-like world with a key difference from the desert planet in "Star Wars" has been serendipitously discovered orbiting not two stars, but a pair of brown dwarfs. What's more, this wacky planet ...

Scientists measured mass and distance of free floating planet drifting through space without star for first time.

Astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made an unusual discovery, finding a planet which is in the process of disintegrating. And as it decays, it is leaving behind a ...