The James Webb Space Telescope reveals that planets may spiral into their stars, rather than being swallowed by expanding red giants. This changes our understanding of planetary destruction. In May ...

James Webb reveals how powerful winds and extreme temperature differences create an unusual atmospheric bulge on the giant ...

Alien life may not need the kind of home humans instinctively search for. Some of the strangest possibilities begin once ...

For generations, artists and science-fiction writers have imagined alien landscapes beneath twin sunsets. The image became iconic in popular culture long before astronomers confirmed that planets ...

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) - In ancient mythology, the phoenix was a miraculous bird with a cyclical pattern of life and death, perishing in flames only to rise again from the ashes. Astronomers have ...

Planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system come in all shapes and sizes but mostly fit into a few categories: large and hot gas giants, super-Earths that are slightly larger than our planet, ...

A privately funded space telescope with a mirror larger than Hubble’s could soon investigate 27 distant giant planets using a ...

While long-fabled technologies like Smell-O-Vision are still a long way off from ever being a reality, astronomers can still technically smell stuff deep in space without actually having to get a ...

FOR the first time, astronomers have seen the glow of alien planets circling sun-like stars. “This is a new era,” says the leader of one of the teams, Drake Deming from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight ...

The green colour of Earth's forests is not accidental. Plants contain chlorophyll, a pigment that absorbs red and blue wavelengths of sunlight while reflecting green light. This process allows plants ...

While one might think metal-rich stars would be more likely to have planets with life, planets around metal-poor stars have better shielding to UV radiation. Stars rich in metals needed for the ...

For the first time, astronomers have seen the glow of alien planets circling sun-like stars. “This is a new era,” says the leader of one of the teams, Drake Deming from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight ...