Deep in the older, denser reaches of the Milky Way, there is a red dwarf star that shouldn’t exist — or at least, its family ...

Relatedly, astronomers may have just pushed the upper size limit of what counts as a planet.

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

Astronomers observed a heart-shaped gas and dust cloud around red giant Mira A before Valentine’s Day, using data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ALMA in Chile.

Detecting exoplanets is one thing, but imaging them is another thing entirely. Astronomers can detect them by the way they block their star's light and by the way they make their stars wobble, and ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

If a gas giant planet is big enough to ignite deuterium fusion, it becomes a brown dwarf instead of a planet. But this definition is incomplete and does not tell us how gas giants form or what ...