New theory proposes that humans — and analogous life beyond Earth — may represent the probable outcome of biological and planetary evolution UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Humanity may not be extraordinary ...

Image: A Hubble Space Telescope image of circumstellar disc surrounding a young star. Just as anthropologists sought “the missing link” between apes and humans, astronomers are embarking on a quest ...

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, ...

The black star represents the position of the star. The colored lines are the orbits of two planets. The yellow one is the outer, and it is highly inclined. The inner one is the red one. As time ...

A new set of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope has captured intricate dusty structures surrounding a young, forming planet, offering unprecedented insights into the earliest stages of ...

How do terrestrial planets like Earth form and evolve to enable life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a pair of scientists from the Southwest Research ...

Plenty of threats already loom here on Earth without us having to worry about a star engulfing our planet. Fortunately, us Earthlings have made our home on a planet in a solar system that has ...

Astronomers have discovered an unusual exoplanet that has managed to retain its atmosphere despite intense nearby radiation from a giant red star. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found the ...

A peculiar planet unraveled by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has left astronomers scratching their heads. Despite being bombarded with intense radiation from its red giant parent ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

New experimental research demonstrates that sub-Neptune exoplanets, the most common class discovered, could possess large quantities of liquid water. The study simulated early planetary conditions, ...