Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets, but few discoveries have stretched scientific expectations like IRAS ...

Planetary rings explained: composition, formation theories, and a comparison of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune’s rings.

In a new study, a team of astrophysicists, including two researchers at CU Boulder, have discovered a small and rocky world orbiting a star far from Earth—similar to our own planet, perhaps, but much ...

Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery. “We went ...

This illustration shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses, and distances from the host star. Astronomers have named them ...

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in ...

Using publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) estimate that six percent of red dwarf stars in the galaxy have ...

Artist's rendition of Mars with Earth-like surface water. We have a fleet of robots seeking out habitability on Mars, but is the planet too small for life in the first place? A new study suggests that ...