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

A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four ...

This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more. Illustration of the Earth-like exoplanet Proxima Centauri b orbiting the star Proxima ...

As the extraordinary pace of astronomical discovery carries on, we increasingly see that the stuff of life is spread throughout the cosmos. Life, even complex life, must be common out there. We know ...

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.

From images taken by NASA spacecrafts, this picture mosaic was created of six of the planets in our solar system and the Earth's moon. In the foreground is the Earth rising over the lunar surface with ...

As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial ...

It was one of humanity’s greater vanities that we ever questioned whether there are any planets in the universe beyond the eight in our little solar system. Our sun is a perfectly ordinary star, ...

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) focuses on finding technosignatures—potential signs of alien technology. If we look carefully, we might have a chance at detecting their ...

Thanks to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets to date, we know that planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune orbit most stars. Oddly, our sun lacks such a planet. That’s been a source ...