Planet hunters have grown used to strange worlds, but a handful of discoveries now point to something even more radical: giant planets that loop around their stars on orbits so skewed they almost defy ...

A massive interstellar object passing through our solar system during its formative years likely altered the orbits of planets into trajectories observed today, a new study says. Interactions with ...

This illustration shows an exoplanet orbiting around two brown dwarfs –– objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers have discovered a ...

While our Sun prefers to go solo, many other stars are parts of binary systems, with a pair of stars gravitationally bound to each other. In some cases, the stars are far enough apart that planets can ...

The Sun is an incandescent but benevolent dictator. For billions of years, it’s kept our star system well organized through the influence of its powerful gravity. All the planets revolve around it on ...

The traditional Habitable Zone (sometimes called the Goldilocks zone) is kind of like a campfire. If you sit too close, you ...

Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the Solar System? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s. Labelled as planet X, prominent astronomers ...

A team of scientists has found a new planet which orbits the wrong way around its host star. The planet, named WASP-17, and orbiting a star 1000 light years away, was found by the UK’s WASP project in ...

A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a new type of planet beyond our solar system—one that stores large amounts of sulfur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The findings have ...

Astronomers have spotted a planet orbiting a star in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy that presents a unique hellscape – covered with a perpetual ocean of magma and ​enveloped by a noxious and ...

Out of the 6,000 known exoplanets, it's these rocky worlds that are most worthy of attention in the search for life beyond ...