"The extraordinary results are an essential step toward understanding the initial conditions that lead to the formation of Earth-like planets." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

How did the universe begin? How do planets form and galaxies develop? Could life exist anywhere else in the cosmos? Questions that have long eluded astronomers could finally be answered with the ...

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 ...

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 long grappled with the question, “How do planets form?” A new collaboration among Arizona State University (ASU) , Michigan State University (MSU) and Lawrence Livermore National ...

Infant planets are ravenous little blighters that quickly devour what remains of the star-circling gas and dust clouds in which they form. The gas in these protoplanetary disks disappears rapidly, ...

An artist’s conception of the exoplanet K2-33b, a 10 Myr Jupiter-sized planet, transiting in front of its active host star. This system is comparable to those which will be observed by the KRONOS ...