Planet

Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet that belongs in a brand new class – an “ultrahot Neptune.” Known as LTT 9779b, the planet orbits extremely close to its star, and raises questions about how such a system came to be.

NASA has discovered a strange star system where a gas giant planet is tightly orbiting a tiny white dwarf. This the first sighting of such an arrangement, raising questions about how the planet survived the star’s expansive death in the first place.

Perhaps on other planets, diamonds are as common and boring as rocks. Astronomers suggest that some planets might actually be largely made of diamonds, and now a team has calculated how such a planet could form and how it would be structured.

The way things are in our solar system aren't always how they work elsewhere in the universe. Now, astronomers have observed a triple star system that’s warping and splitting its planetary disc into strange new shapes and multiple rings.

A new experiment placing bacteria on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) has found that micro-organisms can survive in space for years, or even decades. The study lends weight to the idea that life could travel between planets.

For the first time, astronomers have used a machine learning algorithm – a form of self-teaching AI – to confirm the existence of 50 new exoplanets in data collected by the now retired Kepler space telescope.

Harvard scientists have suggested that the Sun had a long-lost twin. An ancient binary solar system helps explain the strange structure of the Oort cloud, and possibly the hypothetical Planet Nine. Best of all, the team outlines how we could check.

Although astronomers have detected over 4,000 planets outside our solar system, most of them appear as points of data. Now, astronomers have captured a very rare sight, with an image of two exoplanets orbiting a star very much like our own.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a striking sight in the Serpens Nebula – a huge shadow in the shape of a bat. Now, follow-up observations have shown that it appears to be flapping its wings, which may be the influence of a nearby planet.

NASA has released video showing what sunsets might look like on a number of different planets. The simulations were created by a NASA planetary scientist using a computer modeling tool being developed for a possible future mission to Uranus.

According to the results of a new study, stars orbiting near the centers of massive clusters have a much harder time forming planets than their smaller siblings located nearer the edge, and they may have themselves to blame.

Using polarized light, astronomers have detected signs of cloud bands in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf far beyond the solar system. It turns out that these gassy giants have a similar appearance to Jupiter, and the same kind of wild weather.