Some solitary planets wander through interstellar space, offering unexpected surprises about their formation and evolution. Astronomers recently observed a particularly remarkable case in the ...

Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don't ...

A baby world just drifting through space without a star to call home has been caught in a record-smashing feeding frenzy. Not only is this the highest growth rate ever recorded for a planetary-mass ...

Far beyond our solar system, in the distant Pegasus constellation, lies a star system that is reshaping our understanding of planetary formation. HR 8799, located 129 light-years away, is home to a ...

A distant star system with four super-sized gas giants has revealed a surprise. Thanks to JWST’s powerful vision, astronomers detected sulfur in their atmospheres — a chemical clue that they formed ...

Gas giants are massive worlds made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They lack solid surfaces, and in our solar system, Jupiter ...

The formation of planets is a fascinating process. They usually originate in a disc of dust and gas surrounding stars. When particles come together, they form a clump, and through a process called ...

Detection of hydrogen sulfide in four HR 8799 gas giants provides evidence of solid accretion, clarifying how massive exoplanets form and distinguishing them from brown dwarfs ...

Gas giants possibly developed slowly in the solar system. They developed cores layer by layer within a disk of ice and dust ...

I asked my friend Julie Ménard how Earth formed. She’s a planetary scientist at Washington State University. She told me it started with the Big Bang. That was nearly 14 billion years ago. “The Big ...