Not much, unless we're talking about spacecraft. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. For the last month and change, you might've seen ...

Planets may begin forming much earlier than scientists once believed during the final stages of a star s birth, not afterward. This bold new model, backed by simulations from researchers at SwRI, ...

I’m a planetary scientist who was born the year of Sputnik’s launch. Over the course of my 40-year career, I’ve witnessed not one but at least five separate revolutions that fundamentally transformed ...

For the first time in years, astronomers are seriously talking about adding a new member to the solar system’s planetary family. I’m not talking about reviving Pluto’s status, but about a potential ...

About 4.6 billion years ago, a celestial cloud collapsed, paving the way for our solar system to form. Then, a nebula with strong gravitational pull took shape, kick-starting the birth of the sun. But ...

Who’s ready for a “planet parade”? The last planetary alignment was in August 2025, when six planets aligned and four were bright enough to be seen without a telescope. Next week, Mercury, Venus, ...

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 ...

Astronomers have observed a planet that in some ways behaves more like a star — including a massive growth spurt unlike anything witnessed before in a free-floating planet. The rogue planet, which ...

Planets go through different life stages: They form, evolve and eventually meet an end. But the timelines for these processes differ widely between Earth-like planets and worlds that orbit ...

An exoplanetary system about 116 light-years from Earth could flip the script on how planets form, according to researchers who discovered it using telescopes from NASA and the European Space Agency, ...