Across the Milky Way and beyond, planetary systems appear to fall into a few recurring blueprints, and recent exoplanet ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...

When the Sun becomes a red giant, will the outer planets and moons become more temperate and conducive to Earth-like life? Terrence A. Murray Cincinnati, Ohio When the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel ...

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand ...

The black star represents the position of the star. The colored lines are the orbits of two planets. The yellow one is the outer, and it is highly inclined. The inner one is the red one. As time ...

Scientists may have finally revealed the history of the tantalizing TRAPPIST-1 system, an intricate collection of seven worlds that sit about 40 light-years away from us. These worlds, many ...

Artist’s conception of the K2-360 system, showing the ultra-dense super-Earth K2-360 b (red) in its extremely close orbit around its Sun-like star, with the more distant companion K2-360 c (blue) in ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course. When ...

In the distant future—about six billion or seven billion years hence—the sun will start to die, swelling up into a bloated red giant. In a span of several hundred million years it will blow away its ...