Known as orphaned planets, rogue planets, or planets without parent stars, these “outliers” might be the most common planet of all.
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The nearby, bright star Fomalhaut had the first optically imaged planetary candidate. Using JWST’s eyes, astronomers found so much more.
Even if you aren’t in the path of totality, you can still use the solar eclipse to measure how long it takes the Moon to orbit Earth.
Based on the atoms that they’re made out of, the innermost planet should always be the densest. Here’s why Earth beats Mercury, hands down.
Looking at our planet with post-Copernican eyes has the power to change how we relate to it and each other.
As recently as 1990, we didn’t know of any planets beyond our Solar System. Today, with 5000+, we’re deep into the weeds of how they form.
There are pros and cons to sending interstellar messages to aliens that may or may not exist.
There’s an entire Universe out there. So, with all that space, all those planets, and all those chances at life, why do we all live here?
No matter how you define the end, including the demise of humanity, all life, or even the planet itself, our ultimate destruction awaits.
In the largest star-forming region close to Earth, JWST found hundreds of planetary-mass objects. How do these free-floating planets form?
Mars, the red planet, was a world we knew almost nothing about until our first spacecraft visited it. In just ~50 years, how far we’ve come!
In 1990, we only knew of the planets in our own Solar System. Today, the exoplanet count is more than 5000. Here’s what we’ve learned.
In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars.
Most exoplanets have been found around single stars via the transit method. But binary star systems might contain even more of them.
Do aliens dream about meeting us, too?
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Perhaps we should be searching for “other Mercurys” rather than “other Earths.”
Water is vital for life. Luckily for spacefaring humans, the solar system is full of it.
Our Solar System’s outer reaches, and what’s in them, was predicted long before the first Oort Cloud object was ever discovered.
In 1990, we only knew of the ones in our Solar System. Today, we know of thousands, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The most unique interloper into our Solar System has a natural explanation that fits perfectly — no aliens required.
The far side of the Moon is incredibly different from the Earth-facing side. 63 years later, we know why the Moon’s faces are not alike.
2022 was another busy year in the realm of science, with groundbreaking stories spanning space, materials, medicine, and technology.
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use “years” to measure time. Can we do better?
From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
Compared to Earth, Mars is small, cold, dry, and lifeless. But 3.4 billion years ago, a killer asteroid caused a Martian megatsunami.
Until the Apollo missions, we had no idea how the moon got here, just a series of educated guesses. They rewrote the story of the moon’s origins.
Human beings are tiny creatures compared to the 92 billion light-year wide observable Universe. How can we comprehend such large scales?
Einstein’s laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?
We have long thought that Pluto was completely frozen solid, but the discovery of cryovolcanoes challenges that assumption.