Astronomers believe they have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown ninth planet lurking in the not-too-distant reaches of the solar system. This hypothetical world, dubbed "Planet Y," could be ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — A new theory of how planets form finds havens of stability amid violent turbulence in the swirling gas that surrounds a young star. These protected areas are where planets can ...

We all know that stars radiate light and much more. But radiation belts can also surround many other celestial bodies, such ...

Hardy bacteria could survive the trip from one planet to another, hidden among the debris from an asteroid impact, a new study suggests, providing possible evidence for a theory that the seeds of life ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed ...

Tiny life forms tucked into debris from an asteroid hit could catapult to other planets—including Earth—and survive, a new ...

A team of scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Natural Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey, might have found a new dwarf planet, potentially leading to more evidence of a theoretical ...

What can rocky planets orbiting in the outer parts of a solar system teach scientists about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Science hopes to address as a ...

A radical new theory regarding the origin of the universe suggests that gravitational waves, tiny ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915, could have given rise to cosmic ...

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. Of the more ...

When you see art of our solar system as the planet orbit the sun, you may notice that Earth's orbit has a tilt. It is not a perfect circle. What's more, Earth is not the only planet that displays such ...

Many of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy are small, dim red dwarfs—stars much smaller than the sun in both size and mass. TOI-6894, located far away from Earth, is one of them. Astronomers previously ...